[Moto G5S Plus Questions & Answers] Soumyadip999:
Greetings everyone. Sorry if I posted this in the wrong forum. Please move this in appropriate forum if I made a mistake. Believe me, for the last 7 days I have searched all of xda and internet, followed innumerable guides, FAQs and workarounds and none worked. So, as a last resort I am starting this thread

Device: Motorola Moto G5s Plus XT1804 ......4GB _64GB variant

Problem: 1) Baseband not found (unknown) Original Baseband: M8953_52.61.07.98R SANDERS_INDIADSDS_CUST

2) IMEI 0 (Sim cards are not detected).

I bought this refurbished phone about an week ago after my last LG went kaput. I was happy by the build quality of the phone. But it only ran Android 8.1 Oreo. So, I decided to put a custom ROM in it. I am not exactly a newbie to the world of CyanogenMods, Lineage OSes and Pixel Experiences. Or, so I thought. Anyways, after a lot of searching I finally decided on Dot OS 5.2 Official Android 11 version. The ROM looked very pleasing and the reviews looked positive. So, I got the unlock key from Motorola website, unlocked the bootloader, put in official TWRP recovery in it. Everything went like a breeze and in all that excitement I forgot to take a backup of the persist, efs and other partitions. A very costly mistake it seems. DotOS booted 🙂 fine and looked really fresh till I found that there is a small cross near the SIM card network signal triangle up righthand side corner and the signal is only LTE and not VOLTE. I was using a Vodafone Sim card at the time. Although VOLTE option was enabled in SIM settings. To confirm my doubts regarding VOLTE I switched to a JIO Simcard and alas I was not able to make a call without redirecting through the horrid JIO calling app. VOLTE was indeed not working. So, I looked up for a fix and I found a Volte ZIP file from here https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...0QFnoECBAQAQ&usg=AOvVaw0YgJvCjQWXXV8WQSJkxBOK . This was the starting of my troubles. I flashed the universal VOLTE fix zip from TWRP and it flashed fine. On rebooting, I found to my shock that my phone was not turning on. I pressed and held the power key and there was no sign of life. I couldn’t go to the fastboot bootloader or recovery. Only the white led blinked at the top when connected to the charger. My phone was apparently hard bricked. I searched frantically for a solution in this forum and YouTube wherein I found that one can bring it back to life by doing a blankflash. Found the blankflash file here https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...wQFnoECAsQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1eVdBWGVFr8aiqLdP-ZkeT followed the instructions and it flashed my bricked device back to fastboot. I was relieved 😌 for a moment but the next I found that the Bootloader version has downgraded from BL C2 07 to BL C0 05. I knew something was wrong as bootloader downgrade shouldn't be possible. Also the unlock and rooted status were also lost and the baseband was unknown at this point. Anyways the device was recognised as a fastboot device and I tried to flash the stock ROM latest version using the fastboot. But, only then I realised there was something wrong with the bootloader. It gave errors like security downgrade, permission denied, preflash validation failed, remote command failed. At this point I was truly confused and worried. Why would it think the latest bootloader to be a security downgrade to a supposedly old bootloader and prevent me from flashing it. However it did flash the other files like gpt.bin for partition, oem.img, boot.img, system.img sparsechunks and everything else. I booted back to Android 8.1 Oreo and everything seemed working except my IMEI now read zero and my Simcard was not recognised by the device. After that I again unlocked my bootloader. Somehow the original unlock key worked and the bootloader screen said flashing unlocked but the bootloader didn't behave like an unlocked bootloader. The TWRP installed fine but couldn’t install the latest Pixel Experience. The flash screen said PE 11 was for Sanders and my device is (blank no name). I tried both the normal and plus and both behaved similarly. Lineage OS unofficial builds behaved similarly. I again tried Dot OS and Arrow OS and both installed fine except there was no signal. For a moment I tried to forget about the bootloader but concentrated on recovering my IMEI and Baseband but I couldn’t. For nearly 5 days I tried different guides including a detailed guide using Validus Sanders ROM but none worked. My EFS folder has files around 12 megabytes but my Persist seems deleted at zero bytes. The IMEI keeps changing between null, zero and unknown depending on the 20 something ROMs I tasted on this device. At this point, I am at a loss. This was to be my main phone and I am financially crunched. I can't buy another phone right now. 😩 I think that blankflash bootloader is corrupted and it is giving me permission denied errors. Even Magisk won't work properly. I even tried using the official rescue and smart assistant tool by Lenovo and it failed at 47 percent. I tried in different computers and Win7 to Win 11 OSes but it was of no use. I also tried getting a QCN file but I couldn’t get one for the device to recover the IMEI. Please suggest something if anyone of you can save this poor device of mine. Thanks in advance