My Adventure in Unlocking, Rooting, and Customizing my OnePlus 9 (Tmobile Variant)

Totally Worth It

I recently purchased a OnePlus 9 for a really good price. I paid only 180$ for it in basically mint condition.

First off, if you are using the Tmobile variant (LE2117) you will want to Global Convert it.

There are two ways you can go about doing this; Full Conversion (SIM unlock and Global Firmware Flashing) or Partial Conversion (no SIM unlock but flashing Patched Global Firmware).

To begin, you must get a bootloader unlock code from OnePlus themselves. You also need to get the OnePlus USB drivers, the Qualcomm USB/HS drivers, and the Google USB drivers. You will also need ADB and Fastboot. I recommend this download.

Install both the OnePlus and Qualcomm drivers before continuing to flashing Global Firmware.

To flash Global Firmware (Partial), open the MSM Tool exe you got from the conversion links above, hit Enumerate in the top left, and then put the phone into EDL mode. (turn off the phone and hold volume up + volume down and then plug in the USB cable to your phone from your PC). Once in EDL mode, there will be a "COM3" or "COM4" that appears in the MSM Tool. Then, quickly, hit the Start button (you only have a few seconds before the phone automatically reboots out of EDL mode).

(For the Global Firmware (Full), unlock the SIM through Tmobile before flashing).

Once the flashing is done, and the phone is booted, go through all the setup but skip everything you can, the next step will wipe your phone so there is no reason to enter any information.

Once through the setup, go into "About Phone" in settings and tap the "Build Number" 5 times.

Now go into "System Settings" (or "Additional Settings") and go to "Developer Options" and enable "USB Debugging" and "OEM Unlocking".

If the OEM Unlocking option is greyed out, download the OnePlus Tool. (Windows defender will flag this as malware, just make a folder exclusion in Defender and then download the tool into that folder). Then plug in the phone to your PC, open the OnePlus Tool. Next, open settings to the list where "Developer Mode" is, but don't go into Developer Mode yet. In the OnePlus Tool, hit number 12 (option that says "Enable OEM Unlock" in the tool, and then, hit "Allow Debugging from this PC" on the phone. Now go into Developer Options and enable OEM Unlocking. (Sometimes the number 12 option needs to be entered a few times to take effect).

Once you have OEM Unlocking enabled, open the folder where you installed/downloaded adb.exe and fastboot.exe. Hold shift and right click and hit "Open in Powershell". Now, type .\adb.exe reboot bootloader. (Or you can turn the phone off and then hold volume up + volume down + power). Once the phone is booted into fastboot mode, you are ready to flash the OnePlus Unlock Code.

Once you have the "unlock_code.bin" copy it to the fastboot fold where fastboot.exe is, then, once in fastboot mode, you will go back to the powershell window you had open to the ADB and Fastboot location. Type .\fastboot flash cust-unlock unlock_code.bin (It will either say, "Phone is now unlocked, or it will pop-up a screen that says "Yes Unlock" or "No, Don't Unlock", use the volume keys to select "Yes Unlock". Now your phone will reboot, wipe all its data, and will go back to initial setup.

After all these steps you will want to now setup the phone with all your info and security and all other setup customizations.

Now, if you plan to stick with Oxygen OS 11 (Android 11), you will want to download this image. After you download this image, move it into the fastboot/adb folder and once again reboot into fastboot mode. Once in fastboot mode again, you will type .\fastboot boot "twrp_file.img" (remove the quotes and put in the name of the file you downloaded from the link in the beginning of this paragraph). Once TWRP boots, you will slide the slider, go to "Settings" or "Advanced Settings" and hit "Flash Current TWRP". The phone should now flash TWRP. Now, once flashing is finished, go to the main TWRP menu and go to "Reboot" then "Reboot Recovery". Now get the latest Magisk release, rename the .APK file to .ZIP and move to your phone's root directory. Now in TWRP, on the main menu go to "Install", browse to the magisk.zip file, and install it. You now have root. Last steps are to boot into android, open the new Magisk app, and finish Magisk setup.

Now for the OxygenOS 12/13 (Android 12/13) part of the guide. You will now after booting from unlocking the bootloader in fastboot, go into android settings and update the phone. As of the date of this post, there will be about 5 or 6 updates, after the first two (a 480MB and a 1.74GB update), you will have OxygenOS 12. After three more updates (a 400-500MB, a 4.8GB, and a 1.75GB update, you will now have OxygenOS 13.1. After all the updating, follow the above steps except instead of downloading the TWRP from the above link, download this boot.img. (Select the lastest folder and download the boot.img in it).

You now have Root and an Unlocked Bootloader

DO NOT FLASH RANDOM FIRMWARE FILES UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING

I HAVE BRICKED THIS PHONE DOING SO, IT TOOK ME A WEEK TO FIX IT.

(Here are my Sources and other Misc Shit)