If your OnePlus 3 or OnePlus 3T isn’t booting into Android, or you just want to return to stock, this guide will walk you through the entire process.
Unlike Google’s Nexus and Pixel devices, we aren’t given an easy to execute flash-all.bat file that enables us to unbrick our OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3T. There just isn’t a straight forward way to return back to complete stock if something messed up the phone, or if you just want to be back on stock OxygenOS again. I’ve been showing off a large number of modifications for these two devices but I get a lot of requests for how to return back to stock OxygenOS.
Sure, OnePlus does make it easy for us to manually flash the firmware files via TWRP, but some don’t want to have TWRP installed either.
Doing modifications like disabling forced encryption on the OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3T, as well as installing MultiROM on the OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3T can make it difficult to revert. In the case of disabling forced encryption, you can’t even restore from a Nandroid backup with the OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3T because there are issues with the PIN, pattern and password.
So if you have ever gotten to the point where you want to start over, you can follow these steps below.
Unbrick the OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3T
- Disable Driver Signature Enforcement in Windows (Method 2)
- Download and Extract the Drivers (OnePlus 3 – OnePlus 3T)
- Download and Extract the Recovery Tool (OnePlus 3 – OnePlus 3T)
- Power off the OnePlus 3
- Launch Window’s Device Manager
- Press and hold the Volume Up button for ~10 seconds
- Then connect the OnePlus 3 to the PC with a USB cable
- Continue holding the Volume Up button until a new device shows up in Device Manager
- Skip to Step 17 if the OnePlus 3 shows up as Qualcomm 9008
- This could be Unknown Device, QHUSB_BULK (under Unknown Devices) or Qualcomm HS USB (under COMs and Ports)
- Right click the OnePlus 3’s device entry within Device Manager
- Click on Update Driver Software
- Click the Browse option
- Click the Browse option again
- Locate and select the .INF file from the extracted x86 or x64 drivers folder
- When the OnePlus 3 shows up as a Qualcomm 9008 device, you can proceed to Step 17
- Go into the extracted Recovery Tool folder
- Right click the MsmDownloadTool file
- Click the Run As Administrator option
- Grant Administrator access
- Then click the Start button in the top left corner of the program
- Wait until the process completes (you should see green text)
- Unplug the OnePlus 3 from the PC after the phone reboots iteself
- Power the OnePlus 3 on and wait for it to boot into Android
Explanation
You’ll likely only need to deal with the driver part of this guide if your OnePlus 3 or OnePlus 3T is really bricked. If you’re just looking to return to stock (like I was), then you can skip a number of these steps (like I did in the embedded video above). Still, you should go ahead and boot into that special Windows mode just in case. Then download and extract the tools for your device (thanks goes to here and here for the tools) onto the PC.
You’ll want to power down the OnePlus 3 or OnePlus 3T (which can be done by holding down the Power button if the phone is stuck during the boot cycle), and then open up Window’s Device Manager. From here, press and hold down the Volume Up button for 10 seconds. After the time has passed (it doesn’t have to be exact), go ahead and plug in the USB cable to connect the phone to the PC. You’ll want to continue holding this button down until it appears in Device Manager.
If you don’t see the OnePlus 3 or OnePlus 3T recognized as a Qualcomm 9008 device, then you’ll need to find where it is in the Device Manager and update its drivers. You do this by right clicking the detected device and then clicking the Update Driver Software Option. From here, you want to manually tell Windows where the driver file is since we have already downloaded it in Step 2 of the guide. There are 2 folders in this download, x64 or 64-bit computers and x86 for 32-bit computers.
So you’ll have to know which type of computer you have so you can tell it which version of the .INF driver file to install for you. You may be able to do this via trial and error though. I didn’t test it this way so I don’t know for sure. Once you get the OnePlus 3 or OnePlus 3T to show up as a Qualcomm 9008 device, we can proceed to Step 17 of the guide above. You’ll then want to open up the recovery tool folder and locate the .EXE as instructed in the guide.
You’ll want to right click this file and run it as an Administrator since it needs lower level access to the COM ports so it can actually unbrick your device. With the program open, you should see it detected in there and all you have to do is click on the Start button that is sitting in the top left corner. You’ll see the program downloading a number of files and this is where you wait. Once the files have been downloaded, it will start to flash them onto your OnePlus 3 or OnePlus 3T.
When this is done, you’ll see that text turn green, like it is shown in the image above, and then your device should reboot. When it starts to reboot on its own, go ahead and unplug the USB cable from it and it should then be in an off state. You can then press and hold the Power button until it turns on and then wait again for it to boot back into Android. This first boot will take some time since Android has to set everything up again.
Soft bricked my brand-new 3T when an OTA update failed, and I came upon this piece when trying to fix it. It was easy to follow and worked perfectly. Thank you for sharing!
Thanks for the feedback, Brian. I’m sorry you had issues with an OTA update, but am glad this guide worked out for you 🙂 You’re very welcome
my devices is showing as qualcomm 9008 but i can find it in the tool
I soft bricked my OP3T I managed to use this but my phone has still red led and can’t boot into anything other than the qualcomm mode
As simple as it sounds, I’ve seen multiple threads on XDA and the OnePlus forums that just say to charge it for 24 hours
– https://forums.oneplus.net/threads/problem-opo-turned-off-red-led.382744/
Funny enough,I found some thread basically same tutorial as here but I kept holding power button and it started somehow,Now I need to hope that it will boot again if I restart it 😀
That’s great news!
every time i try to install the drivers it shows me the device neme 900E and so i cant find it in the recovering tool. i tried it probably a thousend tims and im getting more and more despairing
with the time. can anyone please help me :/
This might help you
– https://forums.oneplus.net/threads/updated-28-06-2016-mega-unbrick-guide-for-a-hard-bricked-oneplus-2.347607/page-17
Hi, I can’t turn off my op3. It’s in a continous boot. when I press the key 15 seconds it reboot and I cant turn off
I just can enter in the fast boot and when connect it to pc it appear like “android bootloader interface” in my device manager. could I follow the guide anyway? thanks
It won’t hurt to try, but if the program doesn’t detect it then you may have to troubleshoot the driver issue
Hi
I own a 3t
I recently wiped all of the partitions from recovery (including internal storage) so I guess now I’m soft bricked… I tried following this guide but I can’t install the driver: I got into test mode but still when I connect the phone and try to update the driver it will tell me something like “the folder doesn’t contain a driver or it isn’t for 64bit”
Help please!!!!
Hi, I try to following the instruction until step 21, click the Start button in the top left corner of the program. During download process, suddenly the USB device not recognized, then download process is failed. After that, my OP3 can’t boot into anything. Could you help me please, Thanks.
Hello! is there a way to do this procedure on a mac ?
Mate, I want to say I appreciate your step-by-step instructions on unbricking Oneplus, but I have to say I am not most delighted when I find out that all my data got wiped out at the end of this unbrick. You should have said that the process will wipe out entirely all your data and don’t recover them.
-Phil
I saw your comment on YouTube. Again, I apologize but if you had a soft-bricked phone then your data was lost without this tutorial.
If it was truly bricked, there wouldn’t have been any way to recover the data without taking the phone to a professional data recovery company
my oneplus 3t is showing under cdrom instead of com + the system doesnt detect the drivers (there also arent any maps for x64 or x86 like in the video so i dont know if im doing it right theres just a readme pdb. file and three other files with gears on them)
also, the display doesnt work for me at all (so i cant factory reboot or anything), the only thing working is the charge light and the dots on the buttons by the fingerprint sensor. also there are vibrations when i “type” on the dark screen
Are you following step 1 properly and disabling the driver signature enforcement? That should get the phone to show up under com instead of cdrom.
What are these four files you’re talking about? Where are they coming from?
My oneplus 3 running perfectly till a couple months ago and then issues started…I have been able to get over the issues by using the wipe cache and starting over- then I completely wiped everything about a month ago and everything was fine untill 3 days ago- since then the phone would barely start and would shut off after 3 or 4 hours then require a few hours till it started again. Untill last night where it wouldnt start at all.
This morning I decided to follow your steps and managed to get to the green text at the end (thank you)even having the Sahara message (for anyone reading- just keep trying till it works, try changing port and pressing volume up on the 1+)
My issue is that after it finished- nothing happened on the phone, and after 30 seconds the process started again and kind of went into a loop of saying “download complete”
After holding the power button for 20-30 seconds the 1+ logo has popped up , but it stays on that.
any advice (my data is all backed up so willing to try anything to be able to use the phone again)
“After holding the power button for 20-30 seconds the 1+ logo has popped up”
That sounds like a bootloop issue.
“my data is all backed up so willing to try anything to be able to use the phone again”
Assuming you mean a TWRP backup, restoring from it could introduce whatever caused the issue all over again (just a guess).
Since I don’t know what type of backup you have. I have to ask if your bootloader is unlocked?
________________
I actually tried to boot up my OnePlus 3 this week to check the battery level and noticed that it just bootlooped. So, if your bootloader is unlocked then I will experiment with my device to try and get it back to stock properly (I did this manually for my OnePlus 6 and am curious if I can do it for the OnePlus 3 as well). So let me know and if your bootloader is unlocked then I’ll try my unbrick method and see if it works on my device. If it doesn’t then I’ll let you download it and try it out.
Good day. I used your tool and successfully flashed my Oneplus 3t. But unfortunately the download did not happen. Reaches the logo and freezes. You can tell what can be done in this case.
Thank.
After PIE update my phone worked for a day and then not starting and no led whole charging
Tried your methods however always end up donwloading cache.img failed
Any help would be savoir
thank a lot.
Hi,
First of all thank you very much. This guide helped me return my OP3T (A3010) to stock after a soft brick.
I do have an issue issue with discovering Wi-Fi networks though, nothing shows up in either the setup or after setup in the Wi-Fi settings.
I tested my Wi-Fi network and that is not the issue. All other devices pick it up, connect and can use the internet without issue. I live in a high dense area so under normal circumstances pick up 20+ Wi-Fi networks, but nothing shows up on my OP3T.
I have also done a factory reset to see if that would help, but unfortunately it made no difference.
I’ve scoured the internet for forums on the issue, but nothing to help. Any advice or things to try will me much appreciated.
Thank you again,
John
I also have this issue. Did you find a solution?
Hi. My phone was wroking perfectly till yesterday when suddenly screen started to flicker and then a total blackout.
The home buttons and the capacitive buttons are working but i cant see any display. So i found this thread and did everything accordingly and everything worked perfectly but the phone is still not showing any display and im pretty messed up right now.
Does the screen work if you power it off and then boot into Recovery or Fastboot Mode?
If not, then it’s a hardware issue.
Booting into normal OS just takes me to fastboot, booting into recovery just takes me to fastboot.
Windows does not make a sound when I connect the device in fastboot nor when I try steps 5-8.
My driver signatures are disabled and I have all the necessary drivers installed.
Any help would be much appreciated.
Thanks 🙂
Hello
i tried this tutorial but msmdownloadtool show me sahara conection failed, do you know if is possible correct this error and whom, before that this error when the process of msmdonload tool finish show the error md5 checksum failed : system failed i try 10 times and later sahara conection
i hope your help thanks
I had this happen to me many, many times. From what I have been able to uncover, the Sahara message is some sort of connection issue. I want to say it’s because the OnePlus servers are bad/slow but I can’t say for sure.
I was able to get around that error by just trying again and again and again. The issue is msmdownload is getting some sort of error at some part during the download process.
So restarting the tutorial from the start (to get msmdownload to grab the firmware again) will eventually help. I had to try this 2 dozen times one time before I was able to get it to work for me.
Hello,
first of all thank you for your great work with that site Dough. Really appreciate it.
I’m having trouble to download Recovery-Tool from [url removed].
Download process will always end with an error after some time.
Is there another way the get the Recovery-Tool?
Many Thanks in advance
Marcel
Hi Marcel,
I looked into that download (sorry had to remove the URL as I can’t vouch for it) and it downloads just fine for me. That hosting provider does have network/storage issues throughout the year but there aren’t many better options out there.
You’ll want to contact AFH’s support and see if they can detect the issue (a traceroute may help them)
Hi Doug,
outstanding response time, thank you so much for your fast reply.
I just hit the retry button everytime after the download abborted and managed to download the file after half a day. Verified checksum subsequently and got no errors so I’m quite happy with it.
(I informed AFH support team already, lets see if they can say what the problem was/is)
I experienced “sahara conection failed” one time as well. But it wokred well in the second attempt.
My OnePlus3 did restart now load into Android and seem to work fine so far.
Many Thanks again for your great work here Dough
Best Regards
Marcel
Yea, I’m sorry about AFH’s connectivity issues. I use (and pay for) them as well for my uploads. Mainly because there aren’t any other better options but other is because the owner(s) are close to the Android dev community. So I would rather help them than pay for something like Mega.
Thankfully the issues don’t last a long time, but they can certainly be annoying. And to be honest, I doubt support can do much (they have been hit or miss for me). It just seems that they’re getting by with what they can. They would do more, they just aren’t bringing in enough money for the current bills. But that’s just how it seems to me (from the outside in).
i’m glad you were able to get it working eventually though. I had that Sahara issue as well back when I used OnePlus phones (3T was the last one I had as a daily driver) and it took me dozens of times for it to finally unbrick.
And it’s great to hear you have Android up and running again. Let me know if I can help you with anything else.
many thanks, the phone is back to life, but no connectivity 🙁 , but it doesnt find wifi or mobile network, did i miss something?
saludos tengo un oneplus 3 los estaba utilizando normal se friso y luego se apago,hice todo el procedimiento como dices paso por paso pero al final cuando completa la carga de los archivos lo desconecto y lo enciendo solo pone el logo y vuelve y se apaga, me puedes ayudar por favor.
HI,
Thanks for this post. i was able to bring my dead OP3 to life.
With the installer and post OTA update I was only able to reach till patch level of Aug 2017. OxygenOS version post OTA upgrade is 4.5.1 and Android version is 7.1.1, Build number: ONEPLUS A3003_16_171012
Is this expected? OP3 was meant to be upgraded till Android 9. How can I get to my phone to Android 9?
Hey there, this is a great article you’ve posted. It’s indeed timeless!
I have a question though… Will this tool still work on a oneplus 3 running stock Pie?
I recently upgraded to pie (device was never rooted nor the bootloader unlocked, just downloaded and installed Pie OTA from within settings) and now it just keeps bootlooping. I went into the stock recovery and did a factory reset, but it still bootloops or gets stuck at the oneplus logo.
Kindly let me know if it would work. Thank you.