[One (M7) Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] craighumphries:
Hello everyone,

Firstly, I’d just like to say that I’m a bit of a noob. However, I’ve spent hours and hours reading through the forum, googling, reading guides, and generally trying to inform myself before writing this. So hopefully I won’t annoy people with my questions :)

My phone is a factory unlocked HTC One from Amazon Warehouse Germany (ie. second hand, but direct from Amazon themselves). The phone looks great and seemed to work fine, but after deciding that I’d like to go rooted, I had my first encounter with the bootloader. This is where I realised that something wasn’t right….

If I access the bootloader (Power+Vol-), it will always perform a factory reset when I exit. It doesn’t matter whether I try to exit using the Reboot or the Power Down options from the fastboot menu. As soon as I power the phone back on, it will always boot up like it’s a brand new phone that needs setting up from scratch. This is a real pain, because I have to complete that basic phone setup every time - just to know whether or not it happens next time.

At one point I noticed that the botloader already has the **Unlocked** message in the top left corner, so I then followed the relevant guides to clear the cache and flash a custom recovery… When I do this (using fastboot flash recovery command) I always get the message that the recovery was sent and flashed OK. But if I try to access the custom recovery, I just come to a screen with a red exclamation mark inside a triangle. The phone will then eventually reboot its self (in a factory reset state again). From what info I can find, the triangle with the red exclamation mark means that the recovery isn’t actually there.

As a last resort I thought I’d try to fix the phone with an RUU, but for that I need a relocked bootloader. So I tried to do this with the “fastboot oem lock” command and got the following message:

(bootloader) Lock successfully...

(bootloader) mipi display off

(bootloader) mipi_dsi_cmds_tx_ext

(bootloader) pm8921_vreg_disable function, vreg_id = 38

(bootloader) pm8921_vreg_disable function, vreg_id = 1

(bootloader) TZ_HTC_SVC_DISABLE ret = 534642044 (0x1FDDFD7C)

(bootloader) Use PSHOLD to reset device.

FAILED (status read failed (Too many links))

finished. total time: 1.165s

Afted the above message shows, the phone restarts its self automatically and boots up in a factory reset state again. The bootloader also remains unlocked.

I’ve attached a screenshot of my bootloader and here are some details of the phone that I got by using “fastboot getvar all” (I removed the IMEI):

(bootloader) version: 0.5

(bootloader) version-bootloader: 1.55.0000

(bootloader) version-baseband: 4A.21.3263.04

(bootloader) version-cpld: None

(bootloader) version-microp: None

(bootloader) version-main: 3.62.401.1

(bootloader) version-misc: PVT SHIP S-ON

(bootloader) serialno: **************

(bootloader) imei: ***************

(bootloader) meid: 00000000000000

(bootloader) product: m7_ul

(bootloader) platform: HBOOT-8064

(bootloader) modelid: PN0710000

(bootloader) cidnum: HTC__102

(bootloader) battery-status: good

(bootloader) battery-voltage: 4295mV

(bootloader) partition-layout: Generic

(bootloader) security: on

(bootloader) build-mode: SHIP

(bootloader) boot-mode: FASTBOOT

(bootloader) commitno-bootloader: dirty-bb768ae1

(bootloader) hbootpreupdate: 11

(bootloader) gencheckpt: 0

all: Done!

finished. total time: 0.047s

After Googling some of the info from the bootloader screen, I noticed that one of the top results is a htc1guru.com guide to resetting your phone back to stock. For that reason I’m thinking that the previous owner might have messed around with the phone, flashed a few custom roms, and then tried to restore the device back to stock before sending it to Amazon for a refund.

I know that I could complain and send the phone back to amazon myself, but the phone is in such immaculate condition (for a used device) that I’d really like to keep it if possible.

Can anyone help me? please?

Thank you,

Craig.