A few days ago the power button on the Nexus One I’m using stopped working. I don’t know why I was surprised at the time, because the power button had always given me trouble when trying to turn on/off the screen. However, I think I was attributing that to the hard gel case I was using. Anyway, I decided to try and call HTC and see if they would replace it, at the suggestion of my Twitter followers. Luckily, they agreed to replace it since it was a hardware defect that is common with this handset. Then I remembered that I really wanted to get the phone on so I could wipe all of my personal data off it. I know when you send your phone in they say they wipe it clean, etcetera, before trying to refurbish it… but I think we all know by now that I’m a bit paranoid. And this takes me back to the phrase I always tell my friends, or anyone really, “A cellphone is one of the most, if not THE most, personal item you carry around/have in your life.” That being said… I was panicking trying to get the phone to turn on!

A lot of people made suggestions on Twitter on how to get it to turn on. Unfortunately, none of them seemed to be working for me. One suggestion was to switch to a Cyanogen ROM that would allow wakeup with the trackball, but the phone was -off- and I couldn’t flash a new ROM without powering it up. After much fussing with the power button, an attempt to wake it up by holding other buttons with the power button for fast boot, and other crazy ideas (trust me, I was willing to try whatever), a friend finally called me. Neil Lund, owner of Droid Ninja, was on the phone calming me down and telling me how he has been successful booting Nexus Ones with broken power buttons–hooray! Here’s what you do:

1. Plug the phone in– USB or AC works fine.
2. Wait until the charging light comes on.
3. Remove the battery, while leaving the phone plugged in.
4. Replace the battery.
5. Rinse and repeat, and after about 3-4 times, the phone should boot.

This solution seems to have worked for everyone who asked me how I got mine to turn on (and got my chance to wipe my data off it, yay!). I hope it works for you, too. If you have any alternative methods of getting this handset to boot without using the power button, feel free to share them in the comments, or on Twitter to @c0z.