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Help Mysterious Nexus 5 failure

T

taotu

Lurker
I left my month-old Nexus 5 to charge last night, and when I went back to it it was stuck on the bootloader screen- but it's all broken up. (See post below for a link to the image)

I can scroll through the menu but the power button just locks the screen, doesn't select anything. It's no longer recognized by my PC.

The only thing I downloaded recently was Instagram.

Also, it's very strange to me that it says it's unlocked, because I never unlocked it...

Any advice? Is there anything I can do with it, besides sending it to Google for a replacement?
 
Eek. That looks like it might be a hardware failure. If so you may be due for a replacement.

When you plug the phone in, does it show up in device manager with a yellow question mark? Sometimes the drivers are funny with fastboot.

If it does indeed show up, you may be able to download the driver and update it manually through device manager.

From there, if the computer is communicating with the phone, you might try flashing the factory images.

If we get to that point, we have a lovely guide for that here: http://androidforums.com/android-s...e-how-flash-nexus-factory-image-manually.html

We can help get you through that if you need. You'll probably need to download our forums mini sdk as well to be able to flash the factory images.
 
Keep in mind that I am alarmingly new to the entire concept of smartphones so I'm going to need advice-for-dummies type of advice - though I'm reasonably savvy with computers.

I tried to update my USB drivers to connect to the phone, and while it made the android a recognized device, I can't access any information from it, and the only function it's running is "Android Bootloader Interface".

Not sure if I should give a shot to this fastboot process or not, under the circumstances! It doesn't put my warranty at risk or anything, does it?
 
It's okay, I completely understand. We'll start with the driver. Click the link in my last post and download the universal driver linked in the beginning of the guide.

Save that to your desktop (or somewhere handy) and then from device manager, click update driver, then have disk. Choose the driver you downloaded and see if it fixes the driver issue.

Maybe I'm confused. Is the driver shown as working, or is it showing the yellow question mark like there's an issue?
 
It's shown as working now, after I downloaded the Google USB drivers (did that just as I was writing my original post). It originally had a red x indicating that it wasn't working.

Downloading the universal driver doesn't seem to have changed anything.
 
Double-posting to give an update:

I carried on following the steps in that link, and confirmed that when I use a command window I can get my computer to recognize that the device exists.
 
Getting the drivers working and getting the fastboot stuff set up is the hard part. The rest is really just typing in some commands in order. It sounds like you are doing okay. Let us know if you run into anything or have a specific question!

I'll be heading to bed within an hour, so hopefully you can make it through and let me know how it went.

If this guide doesn't fix the problem, you probably have a hardware issue.
 
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