[ZTE Axon 7 Guides, News, & Discussion] Evil0verlord:
It works!!!

It works!!!

Ok.

First.

Vick78 & Choose an username.., you rock!

And the guys over at 4PDA.ru and everyone else who discovered this method!

Long story short, I managed to do a lot of hit and soft bricked my phone twice, and recovered from EDL, and didn’t learn, went ahead and flashed all manner of crap, did all sorts of stuff, till I finally idiotically relocked the bootloader on a custom recovery, TWRP.

Finally hard bricked my A2017U. Classic DFU mode. Won't do anything except g to a locked bootloader (which kept failing commands). Bought an el-cheapo USB cable and built a DIY EDL cable. Didn’t work as well.

Here’s my 2 cents on the process.

1.	Laptop - Preferably get a fresh laptop. The one I was using, I’d messed up with all kinds of driver installs, edits and what not. Didn’t have the patience and energy to reinstall Windows on my own laptop so to be safe I used my brother’s laptop Windows install with no history of ADB or Qualcomm drivers or such.

Charge your phone as much as possible. You need the battery to sustain the EDL mode, and then to later boot up the phone, go to ADB, then EDL, then flash your region version.

3.	Software versions - The versions linked in the OP are important Use those exact ones.

4.	Disassembly video - The screen grabs are from Jerry Rig. His video is perfect to disassemble.

5.	Disassembly – Camera – Do not touch the camera lens with your finger! Grab the camera lens frame, but not the lens part itself! Explained in detail below.

6.	Disassembly – Speaker Grills - The speaker grills are plastic. So when you heat it with the heat gun, depending on how much you heat and how you pry it out, the plastic will warp. Mine warped enough to not be noticed at a glance but it’s noticeable if you hold the phone in your hand.

7.	Reassembly – Speaker Grills - Also putting back the grills while closing the phone the grills don’t stick as reassuringly as you’d want them to. Mine are holding up for now, and the lip on the case of my phone is kind of protecting them as well. So, buy some rubber glue/rubber cement to glue the grill back when you’re closing. That’s the best bet since you may unfortunately need to open your phone again at a later point. If you mess it up horribly though, the speaker grills are available on AliExpress.com Just a head’s up.

8.	Shorting the test point - Test point circuiting is way easier as a two-man job. One guy shorting the point, the other handling the laptop. One can do it as well I suppose though.

9.	The test point is tiny! The one in Jerry rig’s phone is quite well pronounced, Wasn’t the case in mine. I had to use the tiniest head on my screwdriver or a needlepoint to touch it. Tried multiple methods to ground the point. Finally, the one that worked best for me is to get a needle and touch the tip to the point and lean the needle against the metal housing you see on the side of the point. Worked perfectly!

10.	EDL Mode - If your phone keeps booting up, it’ll keep vibrating with every boot and keep looping and vibrating. That’s Not what you want. Your phone should power on up and go straight to EDL mode. And stay there. You can boot up once into EDL to install the Qualcomm driver. The second time. My windows install showed two drivers. Mar 2014 and Aug 2016, I think? I chose the older one.

11.	Flashing – MiFlash will detect the phone in both Normal boot loop mode & EDL mode.

Except you can’t flash in boot loop/non-EDL mode. The only way to ensure you’re in EDL mode is by noticing if the phone vibrated. (My display was disconnected during the procedure and was facing downwards on the desk anyway) The Non-EDL mode will obviously keep throwing errors. If you’re in EDL and all the previous steps were followed correctly, the flashing is a breeze. One shot flashing starts and finishes. Provided you keep the test point shorted. TO be safe, I didn’t release the test point till the flashing was complete. I don’t remember the exact time, but with the B13 Zip included in the first post and the 64bit MiFlash version listed, the entire process took around 200 seconds I think..?

12.	Post flash– The ROM & recovery are Chinese. So the language is Mandarin or Cantonese? I wiped the user data in recovery before the first boot to be safe. Recalled from memory the option number in the stock recovery for wiping. You could choose to not do this as well. Your call. Once booted into the OS, enabling ADB, rebooting to EDL and flashing your region’s stock ROM is a piece of cake.

13.	Camera Jitter – Post the fix, I noticed a jitter in my camera. A Slight lag in shifting and jitter during the viewfinder mode, almost no lag or jitters in the recording mode, but on playback of the recorded video, there are severe jitters spaced a couple of seconds apart, even when holding the phone still.

Before the brick, I had a camera focus issue sometimes, which got fixed by tapping the phone against a hard surface and/or a restart. But no jitters. I don’t specifically remember the camera a lens being manhandled during the disassembly, but this is just another heads up. I don’t know how the OIS mechanism is physically setup, and whether the OIS can be messed up by touching with fingers/manually. This might be completely unrelated, but happened with me, so. I can provide sample videos if someone wants.

PS: Using Open Camera seems to help suppress/alleviate the jitter issue to an extent. Haven’t tried other apps.

Let me know if there’s anything I can add to this is in terms of information.