Almost bricked Fairphone 2 - recovery is broken

Help Fairphone 2
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1

Hi everyone.
I just got my hands on a Fairphone 2 - the previous owner was not satisfied with it due to some issues that I have now fixed.

I also wanted to install Ubuntu Touch on the device, but it seems like I am unable to flash the recovery on the phone:

╰─➤  fastboot flash recovery twrp-3.4.0-0-FP2.img 
target reported max download size of 536870912 bytes
sending 'recovery' (10400 KB)...
OKAY [  0.480s]
writing 'recovery'...
OKAY [  0.256s]
finished. total time: 0.736s

It says OKAY, but it finishes too fast and when I try to boot into recovery - I just get “no command”.
I also tried the official ubports installer, but without any success.
How can I fix this?

2

Welcome to our forum. How about try re-installing Fairphone OS and start again as in this resource?https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/207914363-Manually-install-Fairphone-OS-for-the-Fairphone-2

3

When it shows “No command”, I think you still have to press on Power and then Volume Up.
This is what Fairphone official pages say about booting in recovery:

  • Wait for a couple of seconds until you see a fallen Android robot with the text No command , which could take up to 5 seconds
  • Then, first press and hold the Power button and, after an instant, tap also on the Volume Up button
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4

Thank you very very much!
It was the second part: " Then, first press and hold the Power button and, after an instant, tap also on the Volume Up button" That was missing!
Now I feel stupid :slight_smile:

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5

Yes, that would be the Android stock recovery.
But

should have flashed TWRP, and the phone should now boot TWRP when booting into recovery, not the Android stock recovery.

I don’t see anything wrong with the flashing.
If it was me, I would make sure to use the current Android SDK Platform Tools, and then I would try again with TWRP 3.2.3-0, which was the most stable and trouble-free version so far (TWRP 3.4 is pretty new, and TWRP 3.3 had some quirks).

That installer tended to work lately. Was there an error message, or did the process not complete somehow after rebooting supposedly into recovery?

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6

Hi,
Are you sure you are in TWRP now or is it the Android recovery mode, like on this picture (source):
image

I wonder if your system didn’t overwrite TWRP because you did not reboot into TWRP before restarting the system.

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7

Hi
I just got the no command - the problem was that I did not understand that I needed to perform basically two steps in order to boot into recovery. :slight_smile:

8

Indeed but these steps are for the stock android recovery, while you flashed TWRP. So you shouldn’t have arrived on this no command screen.
That is why @AnotherElk and @chrisse gave you a few advice to get TWRP instead of the stock android recovery.

9

It looks like you are still on Android recovery and that TWRP is not flashed on your phone. Here’s what you should do:

  1. reflash TWRP as you did (or maybe TWRP 3.2.3-0, as @AnotherElk said)
  2. reboot into recovery. When flashing TWRP is over, you can type “fastboot reboot” and at the same time (just after hitting enter), press volume up + power on your phone (source). If it doesn’t work, try again to flash TWRP, then take out the battery of the phone, put it back and power the phone while pressing the volume up button.
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