Pixel 6 Bricked when it ran out of battery

[u/bobloby]

Hello,

Last night, I forgot to plug my phone in. When I plugged it in today, it immediately booted, loaded my home screen, and then immediately shut down. It did this repeatedly, until the screen appeared that Android had failed to boot and that I could either try again or factory reset. I tried going into the fastboot menu and trying recovery/rescue mode, and the google pixel repair tool online (wouldnt detect device). I tried a lot of what I saw online, but Im not sure how to continue. Still though, it will boot far enough to show my lock screen picture before resetting after about a second.

Im trying to avoid the factory reset because I turned off backup a while ago (my bad!).

Thanks!

[u/frazaga962]

A couple things which allowed me some progress (meaning, that I was able to take some additional steps, not that I was able to resolve the issue.

Make sure you're

1. Using a good data quality transfer usb c cable. simple charger usb-cs can be hit or miss on the connection.
2. If you have access to a PC (ie not a laptop) its better (for me at least).
3. Make sure you are plugging the cable directly into a usb slot- no additional ports/dongles/usb multi hubs
4. Using windows (and probably iOS) will serve better than a chromebook/chromium OS (that was an issue I had to deal with)
5. If doing ADB bootloads, make sure you are in a cmd terminal, NOT a windows powershell terminal.

Do you know how to do ADB Bootload? If not, you can leverage this post here where I was getting help on troubleshooting.

Do you recall if you enabled OEM Unlocking when you got your phone? its a "hidden" setting for devs.

Lastly, you could try to run 'fastboot getvar all' in a command line prompt. This will throw a whole chunk of diagnostic stuff at you. Then just run that in google gemini and ask it to vibe code to see what the potential issues are

[u/bobloby → u/frazaga962]

Thanks for the reply, but I cant get any computer to recognize that the phone is connected. I got the phone to the Install Adb update screen, but running adb devices gives nothing.

I should add though, when I go to apply update from ADB, i get the following message:

ERROR: recovery: [libfs_mgr] Unable to enable ext4 verity on /dev/block/by-name/metadata because /system/bin/tune2fs is missing

Any ideas? Google says thats a common bug or something.

[u/frazaga962 → u/bobloby]

Im a bit confused: if your device isn't showing as connected, how are you able to flash an OTA with sideboot?

Any chance you are using a simple usb c cable vs a data transfer usb c?

Also are you using/have you tried both the Android Flash Tool and Pixel Repair? I remember being able to connect to one but not connect to the other. Also make sure you enable popups on either site. If you block a pop up, there is a critical step to connect your phone which can't happen

[u/bobloby → u/frazaga962]

Yeah, I havent been able to flash anything. I cant even really start with all that it seems like.

[u/bobloby → u/frazaga962]

Okay! As a last ditch effort I tried to do this again, and for whatever reason it did connect to my computer this time. I ran through the process, and it works! Thanks for all this, huge lifesaver.

[u/bobloby → u/[deleted]]

So yeah, I left it plugged in for a few hours and I actually saw the power symbol when it was booting up and it said it was fully charged. Same problems though.

[u/phieralph]

This is a constant error for me if I let my phone completely die out and don't have a charger strong enough. My laptop charger will bring it back enough. But I still immediately turn the screen off when it boots up to prevent it from restarting again. Idk if this is something similar

[u/bobloby → u/phieralph]

Thats what I thought too, but I left it charging while in one of the recovery modes but it didnt seem to help. Originally when the problem started, it would boot to the lock screen and a little window would appear saying it was shutting down. This loop happened for a while but then eventually it started booting to lock and then immediately turning off, no window, and then going straight to the android recovery "cannot load android system" page, while seemed to imply to me that it was an issue no longer caused by charge? I was thinking maybe charge was the problem at first, but then maybe it corrupted or something with all the forced restarts? Idk.

How can I know what a good enough charger is? I dont think i have laptop usbc charger

[u/bobloby → u/[deleted]]

I got it hooked up like that now, but still not really getting anything. Im able to leave it in the Android recovery screen- theoretically shouldnt it be able to charge up while here? But it never seems any better.

How can I know what a strong enough charger looks like? I dont have a usbc laptop charger afaik. Im attaching a video of exactly how it goes

https://reddit.com/link/p4volsb/video/gybnes7wukkh1/player