[ASUS ROG Phone 5 / 5s] ChrisMills83:
Hello XDA!

First of all, long time lurker, but infrequent poster here. My phone is an Asus ROG Phone 5s Pro running stock and non-beta software and is not rooted. I am reaching out to see if anyone on here who has more technical savvy than me (which is probably most of y'all) can help me figure out how to reinstall a fresh factory image on my Asus ROG Phone 5s Pro or can offer any other possible solutions for my issue.

The reason I am wanting to do this is because I recently installed a software update from Asus that seems to have a persistent issue that is a pretty major problem to me. The issue is that whenever I reboot the phone and plug in headphones and audio plays, but it stutters and BLASTS out of the headphones (multiple sources tried, even happens with system notification sounds). This only happens with wired headphones and never with Bluetooth. I had this happen to me once for less than a half a second and my ears were persistently ringing for about 3+ hours after this and I am certain that it damaged my hearing to a small degree. Because of this I no longer trust to use any headphones with the phone and this is a huge bummer because I use wired headphones A LOT.

I have tried to factory reset the phone several times already and the issue persists through without any restoring of anything during setup (in fact it won't recognize the backup that it created the day before the factory reset), but the issue is still present. I contacted Asus customer support (for which lets just say I have strong feelings on) and explained the issue and they want me to RMA the phone for a hardware issue.

I really do not wish to do this as this means I will have to either switch phones a few times which is always incredibly time consuming or be without a phone for an estimated period of up to 10 days if I do the RMA. I also disagree that this is a hardware issue because of two things: 1) if it were a hardware issue then I would think that the problem would be constant and not happen just once after each reboot and I would think that doing something in the software, i.e. a reboot, wouldn't consistently recreate the problem. Thus I am trying to find a way to "restore" the operating system of this device to see if I can solve what I believe to be a software issue that shouldn't require any RMA.

I have seen that posts that linked official files from Asus before, such as the "AsusUnlock_1.0.0.7_210127_fulldpi.apk" found in the OP of the "Install any custom ROM on ROG Phone 5 / 5s (GSI)" thread here in this very forum. Is anyone aware of any officially sourced files for stock software/firmware for this phone and a process through which I could reinstall it?

I am also open to thoughts and other possible options to consider.

Also I will give bonus points to anyone who can help me figure out how to fix the issue where my Google backup by this very same phone won't restore its own Google backup when going through the setup and can help me restore it. It does recognize a different Google backup for a tablet that is set up for my child to use, so it is not an issue with the restore being completely broken.

Thanks in advance for anyone willing to try and lend a hand.