[Google Pixel XL Questions & Answers] haseebtehsin:
I bought a Pixel XL yesterday from the local marketplace. It was being sold for cheap and mentioned that after an update the device doesn't start. I bought it for experimentation. When I brought it home it was completely discharged so I hooked it up to a wall charger and tried to turn it on. It turned on but was stuck in bootloop. I left it on charge for about 12 hours or so. After that I picked it up and saw that it was still in bootloop but now it was giving the "no command" screen as opposed to the Google splash screen that it was showing up in the morning. I pressed some buttons and went into recovery. I was completely unfamiliar with the issue at this point. I downloaded the official firmware matching the firmware version with the one being displayed at the top of the recovery screen. I put the phone into the "adb sideload" mode and started the sideload. After it completed the device booted up. I was really happy that I fixed the issue so easily.

However, I immediately got the prompt to update to Android 10 so without doing anything with the phone, I started the update process. I left it to update and after a few minutes I noticed the device was again stuck in the bootloop with the google splash screen. At this point, no matter what I tried, I could not boot into recovery mode but could easily boot into bootloader. After that I did the following things:

-> Tried installing the factory firmware from fastboot using the flash_all.bat file. It failed with an error saying could not update partitions table or something like that

-> I tried to boot into recovery using twrp recovery img but that failed as well, kept getting the Google splash screen

-> I flashed the boot.img from the factory firmware zip (that matched my firmware version) to both the partitions a and b using this command: fastboot flash boot_a path/to/file and fastboot flash boot_ab path/to/file. It did the flashing alright but the device just won't boot into recovery.

-> In short, I exhausted all the options but could not boot into recovery. When powered on with volume up button pressed, the device stayed on a black screen and when I let go the volume up button, the device would start bootlooping again

I hooked up the device to the charger and slept. When I woke up, the device was again stuck in bootloop. I went into bootloader and selected the option to power off. Since the device was on charge it showed the charging battery symbol and automatically landed onto the no command screen. I went into the recovery from there and again sideloaded the factory firmware hoping that the device will boot once done but upon restart it again got stuck into bootloop. I again exhausted all my options but could not get the device boot into the OS. I was however able to boot into twrp recovery and tried to do a complete wipe there but it gave error while wiping the dalvik cache and stopped there without completing the wipe. I pushed the twrp recovery.zip through adb into the device and tried installing, it got stuck while installation was in progress and started rebooting again. I could not get into the recovery again after that point onward. I flashed the factory boot.img to slots a and b but still couldn't get into it.

Now I have hooked up the device to the charger again and left it there. I am hoping after going through the bootloop for another 3 or 4 hours, it will boot into recovery once again. I will provide my results on this.

At this point, does anybody want to share their thoughts on this and suggest something that I should try? One option that I can think off is to disconnect the battery and reconnect it. It may break the loop but I don't want to disassemble the device at this point as I may break something and then won't be able to play with this anymore.