OnePlus had a busy 2020. Apart from the regular offerings, the Chinese OEM also dipped its toes into the budget smartphone market with the OnePlus Nord N10 5G and the OnePlus Nord N100. The wallet-friendly Nord N100 might not be a powerhouse with its 4G-only Qualcomm Snapdragon 460 SoC, but it does share a few things in common with its siblings: a display with a 90Hz refresh rate, an unlockable bootloader for tinkering, and last but not least, the ability to boot into Qualcomm's Emergency Download Mode (known as EDL) on user trigger. Well, who doesn't know that the easy availability of EDL flashers (commonly referred to as "MsmDownloadTool") is the reason why most OnePlus devices are, for the most part, unbrickable?
In case you have a OnePlus Nord N100 and cannot help but wonder why the unbrick tool is not yet available for your device, we are glad to inform you that your wait is over. Our favorite OnePlus aficionado Some_Random_Username has managed to mirror the device-specific MsmDownloadTool package and write a guide explaining what steps are needed to recover a bricked Nord N100 all by yourself.
Download MsmDownloadTool for the OnePlus Nord N100
If your OnePlus Nord N100 is already bricked, connecting the device to a USB port on a PC running Windows should expose it as "QDLOADER 9008" (or “QHUSB_BULK”, if the required driver isn’t properly installed) under Device Manager. To manually trigger EDL mode, hold down both volume up and volume down buttons, and plug the phone into your PC.
There are a few caveats that you need to be aware of prior to using the tool to unbrick your OnePlus Nord N100. The most important being that if you wish to cross-flash a different regional build of OxygenOS during the flashing process, this will not work as the low-level firmware is now tied to the internal device region ID. Also, since OnePlus utilizes VMProtect 3.0 as an obfuscation/anti-debugging measure while building the flasher, your antivirus might flag it as a potentially rogue piece of software. This is a typical case of false-positive, so just ignore the warning and add the tool to the exclusion list of the antivirus.