Fixing a Bootlooping Nexus 5X

The Nexus 5X was a really great phone offered by Google back in 2015. My mother got one that year while I got a Nexus 6P. Both were pretty solid phones for a while. But, after a while, my phone's battery got so ridiculously sketchy that it wouldn't stay on for more than 15 minutes. There was a lawsuit about that, I think. There was also a lawsuit about the Nexus 5X bootlooping or simply not turning on. That's what my mother's phone was doing: not turning on. I recently tried to fix it using a combination of several methods I found on line. Did it work? Kind of.

Welp, here's the phone. It doesn't turn on. Sometimes you'll get the Red Light of Death at the bottom of the phone, but other than that, no signs of life.

After doing some reading on various forums, the problem is with the power chip on the phone. I'm not sure what's wrong with it, but many places said that reflow soldering should fix it. Now, I've never had a successful experience with reflow soldering. But I figured I couldn't break the phone any more than it already was, so I went ahead and tried it.

Luckily, the Nexus 5X is one of the most disassemblable phones I've taken apart, so that was a nice change of pace. It was just a matter of separating the back from the rest of the phone (careful around the USB port) and undoing a bunch of tiny screws. The layers began to strip away until I was left with the motherboard. Make sure you're careful with the flex connectors. They are very easy to break.

And now we can carefully disengage the shield using a guitar pick. Now, let's see what's underneath:

That small black chip surrounded by the grey boxes by the SIM Card reader is what we're after. That's the Power IC. So we just need to reflow this, right? Well, there is a disgusting number of small passives and larger important chips on board that we don't want to move, so we need to take a very careful approach to this one. We need some way to target the heat to only the chip so we can reflow only it.

So I covered it with foil and cut a square out with an X-Acto knife where the chip was. Now, reflow soldering is tricky. I can't really give you a time and temperature because it all depends on the kind of heat gun you have, how much reflowing you need to do, and the alignment of the planets. But, I gave this a generous amount of heat semi-directly (direct heat makes me nervous). After a few minutes of that, I turned it off and I let it cool down. That's a big important step here, because you don't want to knock anything else off of its pads. But, once it cools down, then you're probably ready to go.

I half reassembled the phone. I plugged everything back in except for the battery and put it on a high-powered charger and press and held the power and volume down button just to see if it would boot. And guess what.

I was so giddy with excitement when the thing booted. I thought I had fixed it. It turns out I did not, because the battery is very fickle and the phone doesn't turn on all the time. At one point, it even told me that the operating system was corrupt.

So I hit it with heat again, this time I was more confident with this approach. And again, it worked temporarily, but not permanently. Enough time to get data off of it, but certainly not enough time to make a stable phone.

So I guess that's really the moral of the story here. The phone is super unstable because of poorly designed power circuitry that LG has already been reamed for, but is fixable enough to maybe get your data off in one piece. This is all a real shame, because the Nexus 5X (and the 6P for that matter) were very good looking phones sporting decent specs. But Google, LG, and Huawei weren't willing to own up to their mistakes and tried to sweep it all under the rug with the Pixel phones. I'm very happy with my Pixel 2 XL, but I'm just a bit disappointed that Google fell so low after they made the best phone they've made to date (in my opinion): the Nexus 4.