[Nexus 5 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] napstr:
Cant flash Cyanogen, recovery faulty & weird crashes in stock on refurbished Nexus 5

Hey guys,

so I recently got a "refurbished" replacement for my Nexus 5 and I decided since im starting out fresh (can't access the data on the old one), I'll try out Cyanogen mod.

I can assure you that I followed all the instructions exactly. At some point I checked every download for his checksums and all were ok.

Each time I started the process by flashing a factory image (flash-all.bat), to have a clean start.

I also tried to wipe cache/dalvik cache/data afterwards, but not always. This didn't change the behavior.

These things happened to me while trying to accomplish the task, and working around the issues as they arised:

Flashing TWRP: High (3 of 4) chance that TWRP wouldn't even start up, the phone would hang and just flash the TWRP background picture on screen.

When I did get through to TWRP, applying the Cyanogenmod .zip got stuck at "patching system image unconditionally". Let it go on for hours.

I figured that TWRP was broken and tried Clockworkmod instead. CWM at least always started after flashing it. But same as TWRP, it failed in installing the Cyanogenmod .zip. I tried putting it onto the phone by going into the stock android and then through adb push command, but also through sideloading directly into CWM.

What I noticed when going into the stock ROM was, that a lot of Google processes were failing during the initial setup (where it wants to know ur WiFi, date, Google acc, etc), like Maps, Settings, Play Services, and some others. Sometimes they were failing so hard it was impossible to type in the WiFi passphrase because the notifications of different "xxx has stopped working" were coming to fast, sometimes not a single one was failing. I could not find any pattern to this. When they were failing so hard I couldn't get through the initial setup I would just flash the stock again, until I got only some of them failing, or none at all.

Back to CWM and installing the Cyanogenmod .zip:

It failed with different errors. I got status 0, status 1, I think I once got status 6 or 7, but half of the time it hanged exactly where TWRP was hanging. The errors were random. After getting status X, I would sideload it right again, to get other status Y, sideload again, to get the hang. Could not recognize a pattern.

During this I switched USB ports, and cables, and even tried using my laptop instead of the desktop. One of the cables was faulty, it didn't even allow a connection, but any other setup showed the same behaviour.

Is there anything else I can/should try? Is it my fault, or is the phone bad?

Assuming the phone is bad, I suppose I still could get a stock running without the crashes, so it would _feel_ like the phone is alright (which is what Google probably did before sending it out again as "refurbished"), but I think there would be errors in the future, also I don't want a phone with such an uncertainty. Would they swap it? Also, it is a LG-D820, which means it might have issues with european LTE, haven't gotten to trying that out since I don't use LTE right now, nor will I in the near future.

Best regards,

napster