OnePlus 5 + one !

[Abarbarian]

Equals 6. I must have Portmeirion on my mind for some strange reason.

Maybe the title should be "OnePlus5 + one old duffer"

Well I have been bidding on some OnePlus 3/3 T 's over at E-Bay when a very cheap onePlus 5T caught my eye. Seemed to have a decent screen and case, no sign of scratches on either. Looked as though it booted up as the screen shot showed some text messages.
It did say FAULTY in the description. So why I clicked on the Buy It Now button I'll never know.
Delivery was super fast as it arrived in less than 48 hours. I must be a pretty lucky sort as it had a very thin bubble wrap inside a ordinary orange coloured padded envelope. How the screen did not get cracked etc etc is amazing. Mind you the 5T has an aluminium case so that will have helped.
Now I had ordered a usb-c cable from a different supplier but it had not arrived and probably would not do so till next week. As the 5T did not fire up I needed a cable to test whether it would charge and work and I was too impatient to wait till the cable arrived.
A local hunt was called for.
Hmm where to hunt in Pembroke Dock for the cheapest cable. I could wait till Sunday and try the local boot market. Or I could try Poundland today. Hurray for Poundland cable suppliers supreme. A usb-c to usb cable for a mere £0.69, there was a hitch though. I only had my credit card with me as I left the cash purse at home. To save going home to get cash I added stuff to my basket to bring it up to a reasonable amount. Luxury items like, Snickers at £0.25, Addative free Ginger Beer cans at £0.25, Heinze Chunky Chicken soup at £0.50 etc etc.£11.39 for a £0.69 cable might seem a tad steep but what the heck I guess I could afford a few luxuries.
Lets see if the cable will charge up the 5T for the car cigarette socket, I had a Cigarette usb thing in the glove compartment. Yay it seems to work. Wonder if I can charge via the usb socket in the dash, well blow me that works too. So no need to buy extra stuff for car charging then, that is a relief as all the extras can mount up you know.
Back home, coffee brewed, nice and strong, as I had a hunch that it would be needed. Phone plugged in and left to charge for a while I read a few articles on 5T use.
After half an hour with the battery charged at 3% it was time to see if we had lift of.
Well what do you know the darn thing fires up. No further than the opening screen though as it seems to be locked down and I ain't got no passwords or whatever it needs.
Time for more reading and coffee.
So it seems you can do a refresh or something like, so I tired and tried. Hmm no joy. How about a rest or some such thing. Hmm nope that don't work.
Time for more reading and coffee.
Still no joy. I seem to be able to get so far and then stick at needing log in credentials.
Time for more reading and coffee.
Hmm I have found out about soft reset, hard reset, TWRP, ADB, fastboot and some other stuff and finally found a guide on ho to UNBRICK my 5T. Could not find a guide to do this on my linux box. I did manage to connect and do some stuff with the command line in Arch but whatever I did never unbricked the phone.
So I had to try from a Windows 7 install as all the guides I found pointed to a Windows solution. Luckily I dual boot so that would not be a problem as the guide seemed pretty straight forward. How wrong could I be. I could not get the drivers I needed to install properly on W7 despite trying three or four ways to do so. I kept on being led up dead ends until I found the solution. Once I had the right pieces of the puzzle it was click click and click and hey presto I had UNBRICKED the 5T.
So here I am a proud owner of a darn spiffy modern phone. So far I have managed to not quite set up the fingerprint reader properly. I can access features on the phone. I thought I had set up gestures for the camera but they do not seem to work. I have updated to the very latest Android which I think is 9.
There is a very nice film called Nine, one of my favourites, the original that is,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9_(2005_film)

though the full length feature film is very good too.
Looks like I have a learning curve ahead of me to set this phone up and make it useful to me. Another day perhaps as I am read up and tired. Here are a few reviews on the 5T which puzzle me a tad as my fingerprint gadget is on the front of the phone and it seems to resemble a 5 rather than a 5T. I wonder , hmmmmm.
Well I solved that puzzle. The E-Bay advert stated,

OnePlus 5T - Midnight Black (Unlocked) Smartphone Faulty

an I just checked the phone and it tells me it is a 5 not a 5T. Blimey I should have picked up on that a while back. My excuse is I am a tad worn out being a OAP an all.
So here are a couple of 5 reviews,

OnePlus 5 Review

OnePlus 5 review: Gone, but not forgotten

It has been one heck of a ride so far an it seems I have been quite lucky in my purchase. My £69.00 inc postage gamble may be a winner.

 

[nivrip]

Quite a day, AB. Or was it more than a day?

 

[Abarbarian]

I was a tad tired when I posted last night and did not read through the post. I thought I would add a few extra details about my adventure.

The E-Bay advert only had three small pictures, one of the front ,the back and a screen shot of the phone working. This is the shot that persuaded me to take a gamble on the phone.

It was a small shot at a bad angle an you can just make out some of the text. Containing enough detail for me to go for the long shot punt.

Me Windows 7 gremlins were caused by driver signing issues. I found some drivers for the phone from 2017 and initially thought they were the cause of my troubles. Eventually I found some 2019 drivers and still had problems. I thought the problem was solved when the phone appeared in Device Manager as a phone and not a bulk storage, but it had a small yellow flag showing and a legend telling me that the driver was not signed properly. However Windows also told as I tried to update the driver that I had the latest one and it was installed.Eventually after trying from the Windows command line to allow unsigned drivers and failing. I found out that Windows no longer supported that way, also altering the registry had been stopped and the two free tools I found to do the job just baffled me.
Then it dawned on me that I did not need a permanent solution, though that would have been nice. So I tried the pressing the F key way and that worked.

Progress has been made and my modern phone/Android knowledge base is expanding at a rate of knots.

I finally figured out, by accident how to take a screen shot on the phone and here it is,

I thought that transferring stuff from the Phone to Arch would be pretty difficult after reading the Arch Wiki and a couple of guides. i was wrong it could not have been simpler. I had installed the "android-tools" package as part of my earlier efforts and I think that combined with my PCManFM file manager the phone appears in the file manager and is accessible.

It allowed me to find and post the screen shot I took. So I have transfered some music and a video into the phone and a going to see if they transferred successfully. If they have I will take the phone with me when I go to make a luverly cup of coffee and listen as I brew. Will I be able to hear the music if I carry the phone in my dressing gown pocket ??????????????
All will be revealed in a later post.

 

[Abarbarian]

Quite a day, AB. Or was it more than a day?

Half an afternoon and the whole evening and into the night. A blooming long time.Serves me right for being stubborn.

 

[nivrip]

if I carry the phone in my dressing gown pocket ??????????????
All will be revealed in a later post.

You're wearing a dressing gown and all will be revealed ???

I will close my eyes.

 

[Ian]

Glad you got it up and running! I wonder why it was listed as faulty on eBay? Did you find anything wrong with it now that you've got it up and running?

 

[Abarbarian]

Glad you got it up and running! I wonder why it was listed as faulty on eBay? Did you find anything wrong with it now that you've got it up and running?

Hmm well.

As I thought it was a 5T an there was no way to tell what is was as it would not boot up I ran the unbrick sequence and used the 5T os. Phone booted up and seemed ok but the camera did not work front or back. However I could take selfies with selfi app but not the camera app. So I figured that the cameras were ok and it was a software glitch. Tried several different camera apps, none worked.
Then I twigged that I had a 5 and not a 5T.
Remember I have never ever played or investigated phone hacking before.
As the phone was working I managed to download to it via a usb stick several useful files, TWRP,an os,firmware upgrade and a couple of others.
So I installed TWRP which seemed to work ok. For some reason I had read I needed to upgrade the firmware to install the latest android to avoid glitches, that went ok.
I was intending to use Lineage OS rather than the stock OnePlus so instead of installing the 5 os I decided to install Lineage via twrp. That initially seemed to install ok but failed with an error. It seems the 5T os I had was not the latest 9 version of android. The one I had installed by following an older guide was version 7 I think. So I was going to upgrade the os with the proper 5 os and try installing Lineage again.
However somewhere along the way in the twrp program I seem to have made a wrong click. As the phone shutdown with a 5 second warning to choose from a menu that appeared on screen. When trying any of the options I got the same result. A sort of a loop followed by a total shutdown. I tried a few times to progress but the same thing kept on happening and finally the phone refused to fire up at all, nada zip, dead as a dodo.
I have tried the unbrick route with at least a nine different stock versions of android from older versions to the latest. The unbrick tool seems to run but then sticks at a certain point similar to the two shots below.

One one occasion and only on one occasion the OnePlus Tool showed up several different operational options. I tried a couple of them and the program ran but exited with errors and then closed down and disappeared never to return.

When I use the unbrick tool I get a green led lit on the phone. I am hoping that this indicates that it is charging as well as trying to run the unbrick tool.
So at the moment I am stuck with a bricked phone. I will try to ask over at the XDA forums to see if any one has a different version of the unbrick tool that is unlocked and will allow me to unbrick the phone. I have a feeling that may be possible but then again maybe not.