[HTC One A9] Corneilius:
I hope you like stories because I like telling them.

So, I've been trying to get this phone to work for several weeks now and I'm hoping someone here can help. The backstory is going to make me sound really stupid, but here you go. I bought this phone initially to replace my old Nokia Lumia 710 which is still *functioning*, but lets be honest it needs to be replaced. It cost me $150 if I remember correctly. Well, it worked fine for about a week and then I dropped it and shattered the screen through the LCD layer. I backed up the contents while there was still enough LCD fluid for me to see what I was doing before the whole screen went black.

I then proceeded to take the phone to a repair place where they charged me $200 dollars to replace the screen. Yes, I know I could have just as easily bought one brand new, but the half-off sale was over and I've always been one to fix things instead of replacing them. Of course maybe that will change with this experience. Anyway, when they finally got it back to me and when I turned it on it said there was a software update available. So, I followed the standard procedure and allowed it to download and restart. . . but it got stuck in a loop on the restart. At this point I knew very little about the phone, so I left it at home to die and switched the SIM card back to my Nokia.

Later that day I researched how to 'reset' it, which gave me the instructions for how to put it into bootloader/download mode, and I thought "Well, it still works, I bet they can fix this at the phone repair place". So I charged it, brought it there and showed them that it still worked -sort of- and they told me they would fix it in a day for $30.

A week later they called and said "We can't fix this thing, take it back free of charge". It didn't make any sense to me because the internet made it sound like a 'soft brick' was easy to fix. So I took it back and decided to try fixing it on my own. I downloaded the HTC drivers and got to work. The first thing I found was the HTC official RUU.exe and I tried using it to fix the phone. However, it returned with a 'signature error', which I researched and as far as I can tell it's because the official RUU is nougat and my firmware has the key for marshmallow.

I looked for a RUU.exe that was a marshmallow version, but HTC took down all the downloads that I found links to and no ones seems to have saved it anywhere. Instead I found directions to update manually using a combination of ADB/fastboot/htc_fastboot. I set them up to work on the command line and they all recognize that the phone is connected. I downloaded a marshmallow RUU.zip and tried to flash it, but it failed with the message "main version NOT ALLOWED". I searched around and supposedly it's because the only zips I could find are lower versions than the broken version installed on mine. (something about s-on?)

I then thought that maybe I could update the firmware and then use the official RUU to get it working again. From what I could tell getting a TWRP recovery on there would give me enough access to the phone to allow firmware to be updated. I searched all over for ways to install TWRP, but it failed to flash also. Supposedly I need the bootloader unlocked.

I got an account on HTCDev and started following the directions but the command:

fastboot oem get_identifier_token

Returns an error "last byte is 0x00, disable unlock"

So I guess I can't unlock the bootloader either. . .

The current state of the phone is:

Software Status: Official

Locked

S-ON

Which seems to be the worst case scenario for trying to fix it. Also, just some other info, the OS version is 1.55.617.4

and it's a USA Unlocked version, if that wasn't already described by the OS version. . .

Oh and it's encrypted.

So yeah, I'm giving up today. I already ordered a new phone, however I still think it would be really satisfying to get it working again. You guys are the pros and I am in posession of the most defiant piece of non-functional silicon to ever exist, so if you can tell me how to beat it into submission I will be very happy. Thanks!

-Corneilius