Hi, I am trying to help a friend that is having the following issue with a Pixel 6a:
He says that the phone was sometimes crashing (mostly while changing android profile and apparently it never happened because of low battery), and later the other day it did the same, but this time it never rebooted successfully and is now stuck in a bootloop (the boot process reaches the google logo and the grapheneos log, but then reboots, and sometimes it also show an error message about the data/system to be corrupted).
He also said that (as to my understanding) he was not constant with the updates, and multiple time the phone was rebooting to update itself while he was using it.
The phone is currently on the 2024082200 version and if we try to sideload the 2024083100 or 2024090400 bluejay ota update zip it always aborts with the same "signature verification failed" (shown below).
This is the first error he was getting with the 2024083100 update with the SIM present on the phone (we read somewhere in the internet that SIM or no SIM could make a difference, so we tried both):
https://ibb.co/5vj1cg8
While this is the error without the SIM:
https://ibb.co/yPcM3nW
And here are some of the logs of the process, in order (sorry for the bad screenshots, but we had limited resources):
https://ibb.co/FhJMtDY
https://ibb.co/mHJxps3
So there is always that hash/signature mismatch.
Nothing changed with the September update.
We also tried to check if a "merging" process had been interrupted, the one in which you need to use "fastboot snapshot-update merge", but no.
I hope those info are useful to debug the situation as I don't really know where to go from here, could the phone be "compromised"? Is is just corrupted (the filesystem/hardware I mean)? What could we check to better understand where the problem is?