Pixel 9 not updating from 2025120401

stork

My pixel is failing to update from 2025120401. When applying the update installation appears successful but reboot fails and results in rollback. The device will reboot twice after the GrapheneOS logo and on the third reboot it will be back on 20251204

Things I've tried:

Toggling on and off security preview
ADB sideloading the latest update
Changing release channel

All result in rollback, not sure what to try next, doesn't seem to be a known issue from what I can see.

Novalissoide

stork Use your Auditor app to check device integrity.
Is the device auto-updated?
Is Developer Options turned OFF?
Have Adb or Shizuku been used at any time, for any reason?

Novalissoide

stork and is system time correct?

de0u

stork Maybe try this? https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/12814-fixing-the-your-device-is-corrupt-error-after-power-loss-during-system-update

I am not confident, but it should be safe.

Novalissoide

stork release 2026011000 is in Beta now.

stork

Novalissoide
Yes, auto updates are turned on.
Developer options were off but turned on to try sideloading the update.
ADB was off until turned on to sideload the update ( now turned off again).
Shizuku - never used.

Auditor app successfully performs strong paired verification and identity confirmation:
Pinned security level: High — StrongBox Hardware Security Module (HSM) with pairing specific attest key
Pinned device: Google Pixel 9
Pinned OS: GrapheneOS (unmodified official release)
Pinned OS version: 16.0.0
Pinned OS patch level: 2025-12
Pinned vendor patch level: 2025-12-01
Pinned boot patch level: 2025-12-01

Pinned Auditor app version: 90
Pinned Auditor app variant: Release build signed by GrapheneOS
User profile secure: yes
Enrolled biometrics: yes
Accessibility service(s) enabled: no
Device administrator(s) enabled: no
Android Debug Bridge enabled: no
Add users from lock screen: no
OEM unlocking allowed: no
Main user account: yes
USB-C port security mode: On
Auto reboot timeout: 18 hours
User count: 1

Novalissoide

stork I expected to see the 'Pinned verified boot key hash' among the lines here. Did you do all the steps, is the background turned GREEN?

de0u

stork ADB was off until turned on to sideload the update ( now turned off again).

It is not necessary to enable USB debugging of the OS to sideload, since the sideload process goes through Recovery and it signature-checks the image (source).

stork

Novalissoide
Yes, I selectively copy and pasted the lines, the background did turn green
Pinned verified boot key hash: 9E6A8F3E0D761A780179F93ACD5721BA1AB7C8C537C7761073C0A754B0E932DE

Novalissoide

stork that line checks out.
Maybe try an install of, not the latest release, but one step past the one installed. Just to check if this changes anything.

Novalissoide

stork you could also try manually changing system time to a long time in the future, then test. (Remember turning auto-time back on afterwards)

stork

Novalissoide could you elaborate on this? Why would changing the time far into the future impact the update process?

stork

How would I go about doing that officially?

GrapheneOS only provides a link to the latest update. I did actually already figure out that a few older releases are still available and downloaded them by editing the url 20251212 was the oldest still available. I tried these 3 updates via ADB, all installed successfully but rolled back on reboot:
tokay-ota_update-2025121200.zip
tokay-ota_update-2025121201.zip
tokay-ota_update-2025122500.zip

121001 doesn't seem to be available anymore get a 404 on that.

Novalissoide

stork a couple of weird storage space bugs is fixed by this practice. I don't have a detailed explaination of what makes it work, I assume it sounds silly.

Novalissoide

stork speaking of storage space, do you have enough device free space?

stork

Novalissoide yes 60+ GB free, no storage space issues

stork

de0u Thanks for the reply. Slot a is marked as NOK; however, there is no snapshot-update-status.
I decided not to try merging for this reason.

It was also a bit tricky to get the fastboot vars. It didn't work for me when entering fastboot from recovery where I would get the following error:
getvar:all FAILED (remote: 'Device is locked')

It was only possible to get there by holding volume down during the boot process:

(bootloader) slot-count:2
(bootloader) slot-fastboot-ok:a:no
(bootloader) slot-fastboot-ok:b:yes
(bootloader) slot-retry-count:a:0
(bootloader) slot-retry-count:b:2
(bootloader) slot-successful:a:no
(bootloader) slot-successful:b:yes
(bootloader) slot-suffixes:_a,_b
(bootloader) slot-unbootable:a:no
(bootloader) slot-unbootable:b:no
(bootloader) snapshot-update-status:none

stork

Actually the bootloader version appears to be rolling back as well. If I pull the fastboot vars after first boot (it usually reboots 3 times) I get the following:

(bootloader) slot-count:2
(bootloader) slot-fastboot-ok:a:yes
(bootloader) slot-fastboot-ok:b:yes
(bootloader) slot-retry-count:a:2
(bootloader) slot-retry-count:b:2
(bootloader) slot-successful:a:no
(bootloader) slot-successful:b:yes
(bootloader) slot-suffixes:_a,_b
(bootloader) slot-unbootable:a:no
(bootloader) slot-unbootable:b:no
(bootloader) snapshot-update-status:snapshotted
(bootloader) version-bootloader:ripcurrentpro-16.4-14097580

stork

Rebooting before the system update has a chance to download and install itself again I can see that the bootloader rolled back to 16.3:
(bootloader) version-bootloader:ripcurrentpro-16.3-13642544

de0u

stork Does this seem like the issue on your device? https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/6868

If so, it looks as if it will be fixed soon.

Novalissoide

In the release notes for 2026010800, not yet available, this entry:

add workaround for upstream KeySetManagerService system_server crash causing a user to be stuck on an old OS version due to it causing a boot failure when booting a the new OS version after updating