Unlocking a broken-screen nexus 6

Question

I have a pretty stock nexus 6. It has whole-disk encryption turned on, AFAIK (I didn't change any settings from when I first got it, and requires the PIN to boot up). I dropped it yesterday, during which time the screen completely died and the phone rebooted.

The screen is just plain black, and as far as I can tell is also not registering any touches (no tactile feedback, etc). The phone is now in the "waiting to boot" mode where it ticks every second to remind me to enter my PIN.

I've already ordered a new phone, but I'd like to wipe this one before I recycle it. Has anyone had any luck with alternative methods of entering data into the phone? All I really need to do is get the pin entered so it can boot up. Then (hopefully) it'll find service or wifi, at which point I can send a remote wipe command. It's just that I can't do anything over USB while it's still partly booted the way it is.

Random Username · Answer

You said in your post that you want to unlock it, so you can do a data wipe / factory reset on it? Right?

Why don't you just take a hammer to it?

Maybe toss it into a fire?

To answer your question... No. There is no way to enter the pin on that phone if you cannot use the touch screen. The only thing you would be able to do to that phone now is do the "hard master reset" by pressing the button combination for that phone. That would also delete all the data stored on that phone.

To find the master reset button combination for that phone, try using Google or going to xda-developers.

Unlocking a broken-screen nexus 6

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