[OnePlus 6 Guides, News, & Discussion] sbpetrack:
1. I think that i am hitting up against the issue of certain versions not working or corrupting data if the phone has a PIN/pattern/biometric lock. Unfortunately my phone is messed up enough that I can't boot into the OS, only into fastboot and TWRP. I have a pin-lock. Is there any way to remove this PIN lock via fastboot or recovery (i.e. without the OS)?

2. At this point I'm pretty sure my data is already gone. In such a case, is there any downside to using the nuclear option of this Qualcomm MSMTool? Even More important: The directions for using that Tool are quite straightfoward: can anyone tell me if that's because it's easy and straightforward to, or is it because in fact, just like with twrp, there are 10000s of little tiny stupid details that one would never imagine until you follow one of the online tutorials and discover that they didn't mention that you need to have EXACTLY one single version of the tool, or you need to rename the stock image to have a name which is a palindrome in Turkish, or etc etc.

3. Some of the instructions say very plainly that you can ONLY restore the same version of the OS that is on the phone. You can't use them to upgrade or downgrade version. Well, does that mean in my case that I can only use those methods to go from one non-working OS to another non-working OS (because I can't seem to boot the 8.1 OS which was there before). In other words: if i can't boot to an OS, does this mean that I **MUST** use the MSMTool?

4. If i use the MSMTool, do I need to worry that my partitions are correct beforehand? And if so, is there somewhere I can read what the correct partition table for my OnePLus 6 should be, and a tool to help me see what it is, and (if need be) reset it to the correct values? I know that there is no recovery partition any more, but who knows what mess the "bad" versions of fasbtoot, adb, and twrp have done to the partitions. ANd as far as I can see, the "stock image" is a ...boot.img file - so i assume that it won't change anything but the boot partition. I would like to restore EVERYTHING.

WHAT I THINK I"VE LEARNED SO FAR THAT MIGHT HELP PROTECT THE NEXT VICTIM:

I began by "simply" wanting to upgrade from 8.1 to 9.0.2, and despite reading 10s of pages here, I fear that my OP 6 is now a pile of spaghetti inside that I need to somehow disentangle. From my last read-through of pages in this thread, I think that my two gravest errors were: 1) that I didn't know one needs to use a VERY PARTICULAR version of blu_spark (from early september, version given here a page or two ago; and 2) it seems that some of these things (i suppose including the version of blu_spark that works) mess things up when there is PIN or pattern or other lock. I'm now in a situation where it seems that if i use the stock twrp 3.2.3 then I get the QualComm crashdump when i boot into recovery, and if i use the bluespark twrp to flash a stock 9.0.2 .zip that it fails because of incompatibility with a PIN-locked device. Perhaps if i had can remove the PIN-lock via fastboot or adb, and also use the ONE RIGHT version of blu_sparks I could actually get the OS installed and still not lose data (because in truth i only did a format of data wtih the b slot active (perhaps a is still good?). I wish I could do something other than guess which of the two paths is more likely to lead to a working phone (the MSMTool about which there is nothing but the simple instructions, so there's every reason to think that will be yet another death by 1000 cuts. Or somehow removing the lock via recovery and fastboot alone) If you're just starting out, you might be in luck if you remember that 1. until there is evidence that the 'stock' twrp works, one needs to use blu_sparks and use exactly the right version of it; and 2. one needs to remove any PIN/pattern/biometric lock beforehand.

---------- Post added at 05:11 AM ---------- Previous post was at 04:25 AM ----------

Please explain:

1. Exactly what does the All-in-one tool "fix" and how does one use it to fix "it".

I am seeing the same problem as the original poster: I can flash the latest stock twrp .img file to my OnePLus 6 phone. I can also run an older twrp ON the phone and flash the latest stock twrp .zip file to the phone. But in both cases, the resulting phone will not boot into recovery.

I assume you are asserting that if I don't flash with fastboot or with twrp, but instead with this AIO tool, I will then be able to boot to recovery. This seems hard to believe: I assume that the AIO tool is a beautiful and beautifully useful GUI front end to fastboot. But maybe I shouldn't assume....Can you tell me what you actually did and what actually worked as a result? thanks!

Perhaps you just have a better fastboot than the orignial poster?

2. The first page of the AIO-tool thread page contains a list of all support and many unsupported devices. And the ability of AIO tool to flash even stock recovery is listed there as "NO". So it can't flash a stock recovery, but can flash the custom twrp recovery?

Thanks for any insight you can give.

From what I can see from reading, it's possible that the original poster has an Android which is locked by PIN or pattern or fingerprint or retina, and it seems that the stock twrp fails in that case. Perhaps your android had no boot-time lock, and this is why you could flash a new one. (Unrelated to the AIO tool)