@Lakotaubp

SOLVED!

It turns out that the post you linked was the ticket: one of the responses said that he had used a VM installation and that when he arrived at the same point I had, it was a simple matter of reconnecting the device. I had initially not investigated this solution because I had tried reconnecting many times, but I decided to give it a try because everything else had not worked, and it seems to have worked. My device is currently displaying "Installing update" with the UBPorts mascot and an orange dot indicating it is doing some work. I will be leaving it like that overnight just to ensure I do not bork any important operations.

For posterity, I will include a step-by-step description of what I did in case anyone else has this problem in the future. I feel pretty stupid right now, but I'm just so glad to have it working properly:

• Do the steps I described in my first post
• Get to the point in the GUI installer where it boots the device out of the Android bootloader and into the UBPorts Recovery mode (with the UBPorts mascot on the top right)
• You should have received a message from your Windows host machine that the device is unrecognizable. This does NOT mean you cannot connect it.
• Disconnect and reconnect the device to the Windows machine. If you have properly installed adb and the other preliminary files, then you should be able to connect it to the VM. In my case, I received a prompt from the VM because it recognized a device being connected.
• At this point, the GUI installer should recognize the device and its state, and begin downloading files.
• I did not experience any other issues to the end of the installation, and my device is now operational.

Thank you so much for your help, everyone. Now I just need to do this a couple more times so I have backup phones and I'll be set to check out of the Google/Apple mobile ecosystem.

@UniSuperBox
Thank you for your encouragement. I just checked the thread now and for whatever reason it hadn't occurred to me that the installer would be able to recover from a partial installation. I did what you suggested (connected the device to my Windows machine, then connected it to the Ubuntu VM and ran the installer from the terminal), and it detected the device correctly.

Then the following happened:

• terminal displayed some messages

info: Welcome to the UBports Installer version 0.2.6-beta!
info: hammerhead selected
info: Instructing manual reboot
info: Press and hold the volume down and power buttons until the phone reboots.
info: fastboot: wait for device
info: Download complete
info: Flashing images...
info: Booting into recovery image...
info: bootstrap done: rebooting automatically

• the device rebooted into UBports Recovery mode
• the device disconnected from my Windows machine and the Ubuntu VM, and does not appear in the Player > Removable Devices menu
• UBPorts installer currently says "Waiting for device to enter recovery mode . . ." > "Flashing recovery and boot images"

I think this is where I had disconnected it during the first installation because nothing appeared to be happening and the device seems to have disconnected. I will keep it connected now, because it's not as though I have anything else to do with it. I read a few other forum posts from people in similar situations, and one thing a couple of them had said was that the process of actually installing and booting the Ubuntu Touch files can take a very long time.

If it works itself out, I will update the thread. In the meantime, ask away if anyone has any questions.

UPDATE: I ran adb devices and sudo adb devices to confirm whether or not the VM sees the device attached, and both command return an empty list of devices. I think the installation process is frozen now, but I am unsure what to do. Logically, it seems like I should reboot the device in the UBports Recovery menu, but I am not sure if that would snarl things further.

@Lakotaubp

SOLVED!

It turns out that the post you linked was the ticket: one of the responses said that he had used a VM installation and that when he arrived at the same point I had, it was a simple matter of reconnecting the device. I had initially not investigated this solution because I had tried reconnecting many times, but I decided to give it a try because everything else had not worked, and it seems to have worked. My device is currently displaying "Installing update" with the UBPorts mascot and an orange dot indicating it is doing some work. I will be leaving it like that overnight just to ensure I do not bork any important operations.

For posterity, I will include a step-by-step description of what I did in case anyone else has this problem in the future. I feel pretty stupid right now, but I'm just so glad to have it working properly:

• Do the steps I described in my first post
• Get to the point in the GUI installer where it boots the device out of the Android bootloader and into the UBPorts Recovery mode (with the UBPorts mascot on the top right)
• You should have received a message from your Windows host machine that the device is unrecognizable. This does NOT mean you cannot connect it.
• Disconnect and reconnect the device to the Windows machine. If you have properly installed adb and the other preliminary files, then you should be able to connect it to the VM. In my case, I received a prompt from the VM because it recognized a device being connected.
• At this point, the GUI installer should recognize the device and its state, and begin downloading files.
• I did not experience any other issues to the end of the installation, and my device is now operational.

Thank you so much for your help, everyone. Now I just need to do this a couple more times so I have backup phones and I'll be set to check out of the Google/Apple mobile ecosystem.

@UniSuperBox
Thank you for your encouragement. I just checked the thread now and for whatever reason it hadn't occurred to me that the installer would be able to recover from a partial installation. I did what you suggested (connected the device to my Windows machine, then connected it to the Ubuntu VM and ran the installer from the terminal), and it detected the device correctly.

Then the following happened:

• terminal displayed some messages

info: Welcome to the UBports Installer version 0.2.6-beta!
info: hammerhead selected
info: Instructing manual reboot
info: Press and hold the volume down and power buttons until the phone reboots.
info: fastboot: wait for device
info: Download complete
info: Flashing images...
info: Booting into recovery image...
info: bootstrap done: rebooting automatically

• the device rebooted into UBports Recovery mode
• the device disconnected from my Windows machine and the Ubuntu VM, and does not appear in the Player > Removable Devices menu
• UBPorts installer currently says "Waiting for device to enter recovery mode . . ." > "Flashing recovery and boot images"

I think this is where I had disconnected it during the first installation because nothing appeared to be happening and the device seems to have disconnected. I will keep it connected now, because it's not as though I have anything else to do with it. I read a few other forum posts from people in similar situations, and one thing a couple of them had said was that the process of actually installing and booting the Ubuntu Touch files can take a very long time.

If it works itself out, I will update the thread. In the meantime, ask away if anyone has any questions.

UPDATE: I ran adb devices and sudo adb devices to confirm whether or not the VM sees the device attached, and both command return an empty list of devices. I think the installation process is frozen now, but I am unsure what to do. Logically, it seems like I should reboot the device in the UBports Recovery menu, but I am not sure if that would snarl things further.

Just wanted to update the thread as to my conclusions and potential solutions. From what I have gathered, my phone seems to have well and truly soft-bricked itself, because even on Windows and the Ubuntu VM it is not recognized properly. Both machines read the Nexus LG 5 as a generic Android device, but cannot successfully connect to it. I think this is distinct from the connectivity problems some other people in the thread encountered because the device is connecting to my computer, but the software I have cannot properly see it.

I have tried the Nexus Root Toolkit as flowbee suggested, and although it was a great resource, it too had the same problem: my device just isn't recognized when it's in bootloader mode. This means I cannot restore it to its factory settings.

I have also tried swapping USB cables, and that made no difference.

I think at this point I will be getting a new Nexus LG 5 through Kijiji or something, and then trying to install UBTouch more carefully. I am still very interested in having a glorified PDA that isn't beholden to either Apple or Google, and fortunately getting another LG 5 won't cost me more than $80 at the upper end. If nothing else, this was a learning experience.

Hello. A couple months ago, I tried installing UT on a recently acquired Nexus 5, but I encountered some problems which prevented the installation from succeeding. I am now in the process of downloading a phone img from Google to reflash the device back to its defaults, but in the meantime I wanted to describe the problems I encountered and see if there were any obvious things I was doing wrong. I probably should have made this thread three months ago, but that's my mistake.

Anyway, I went through the installation process as usual on Windows 7, attempting to use the GUI installer.

• enable android debugging
• enable the bootloader
• connect the device to my PC and run the GUI installer
  The GUI installer did not recognize the phone immediately, but I was able to select "Nexus 5" from the dropdown menu and apply the settings I wanted for installation (default, format memory, no custom instructions). When I attempted to proceed to the next step, the installer would try to connect to the device, but not succeed.

This frustrated me, and some cursory research told me I might have better luck on Linux. I created a simple Linux VM in VMWare Workstation, then downloaded the GUI installer on that machine and connected the device to it. This time it detected the device correctly when I connected it with a USB cable and told VMWare to always connect that device to the VM instead of my PC by default

I was able to progress a bit with the installation here, but I was still not successful.

• all settings as above, except the installer recognizes the device automatically
• some files are transferred onto the Nexus 5, and it restarts to the UBPorts Recovery Mode screen
• it reboots once more into the default "Google" loading screen
• the device disconnects from the VM and my PC
• the default loading screen does not ever change

At this point, I think there are some core files that were removed, which prevents the device from booting normally. The UT installation has a foot in the door, but is still missing files due to the disconnection.

My course of action from here is basically starting from square one and not getting as frustrated as I did last time. I still intend to install the device using a VM because that seemed to be the simplest solution, and it avoids the instability of using the Windows installer.

• reset Nexus 5 to factory defaults
• download newest installers and drivers
• be more careful about installing and not making any errors

tl;dr
I know this post was long-winded, but all I really want to know is whether or not I made a significant error, and how to avoid repeating it if I did. Thanks in advance for any insights you can share.