Before even touching the phone, Marcus opened his laptop. He knew the first rule of phone modding: Unlocking the bootloader wipes everything. Not a factory reset—a complete, irreversible data shred.

He then rebooted the phone into the bootloader mode using:

He backed up his photos to Google Drive, exported his contacts, and copied his music to an external SSD. He triple-checked. Once the process started, the phone would become a blank slate.