Last week I ended up hard bricking my Pixel 2 XL with a stupid mistake,I ended up locking my bootloader with an invalid partition.This was a hard brick and the only ones who can unlock is google.I tried to schedule a repair through the google store.Their cost estimator returned a cost to repair nearly the price of a new google pixel. So I decided to switch back to my old Xiaomi A2.I turned on the device after a while and the operating system on the device was more than 3 years old.

I decided to build PixelExperience rom for my device, It took a while as my HDD was pretty slow.However it completed in 2 hours. This is how I got the rom installed on my device.

  • I first booted into the bootloader using adb. adb reboot bootloader
  • I then flashed the bootloader on both the partitions 
    fastboot --set-active=a
fastboot flash boot recovery.img
fastboot --set-active=b
fastboot flash boot recovery.img
  • I then ran fastboot reboot recovery to boot into recovery.
  • I then had to flash the following zip which sets up the new partition scheme required for newer versions of android, using the adb sideload option in recovery adb sideload copy-partitions-20210323_1992.zip
  • Next I had to reboot into recovery again using the ui.
  • To support dynamic partitions I had to flash the following img, however the way to flash it is a bit different.
  • I had to switch to fastboot using the recovery screen and then run the following fastboot wipe-super super_empty.img
  • I then performed a factory reset on the phone.
  • The active partition was set to b so that the inactive partition is a where the recovery would install the operating system.
  • Once that was complete I had to switch back to recovery and sideload the final rom adb sideload pixelexperience_jasmine_sprout.zip
  • Another factory reset on the phone just to be safe.