The Prerequisites you quote include a link to Android Studio (which includes the “Android Debug Bridge” - long for ADB), but on Windows you can alternatively install the lightweight Minimal ADB and Fastboot.
To open the command prompt (CMD), press Windows key + R (for “Run”), type cmd and click “OK”.
The CMD command to navigate directories is “cd” (change directory).
You downloaded the ZIP and extracted the contents into a directory, let’s say to “C:\temp” (just an example, I don’t know where you extracted the ZIP contents). So to get there in CMD, you would type cd “C:\temp” and hit ENTER, the prompt in CMD should reflect that change of the directory.
Now you can check whether you are in the right directory by giving the “dir” command which lists the contents of the directory. They should include the file “flash.bat”. Should look like this:
Then it is important that CMD knows where to find the fastboot command that is used in the flash.bat script. Installing Minimal ADB and Fastboot should take care of that for you, I don’t know about Android Studio.
You can check that by giving the “fastboot devices” command, which should output a cryptic device number, or a blank line if your phone is not hooked up to the PC in fastboot mode.
If CMD instead complains that it can’t find “fastboot” or it is maybe spelled wrong, then CMD wasn’t able to find fastboot.
In this case, you can point it to there following this guide … this guide is giving you the steps for Android Studio already, in case Minimal ADB and Fastboot didn’t do that part, you would have to add “C:\Program Files (x86)\Minimal ADB and Fastboot”.
If all is well, you can then type “flash.bat” in CMD and hit ENTER and hopefully everything runs just fine from there on.
Minimal ADB and Fastboot offers me a direct root into the command menu. However if I complete the line
C:\Program Files (x86)\Minimal ADB and Fastboot>flash.bat and press enter
the response is that “flash.bat” cannot be found or is spelled wrong.
I have checked that the flash.bat file is unzipped. If I enter flash.bat in the directory in which it is located, I get the response that Fastboot can’t be found.
flash.bat is basically a list of instructions that get interpreted the same way that any command that you type will be interpreted. When you type a file name or a command, the system will look for that command or that file in a limited number of places. Fixing this can therefore be done by giving the system hints on where to look, or alternatively, copying the required files over (not recommended).
The neatest way of telling the system where to find fastboot, which is basically what the guide linked to by AnotherElk is explaining in brief. Follow the guide for instructions on how to set it permanently, or if you only need it for this session: run this before you run flash.bat:
set PATH="%PATH%;C:\Program Files (x86)\Minimal ADB and Fastboot"
This is assuming that fastboot is installed in the directory you mention.
thanks to your tips, I managed to execute the flash.bat command.
However it doesn’t seem to have solved the problem, because when the phone restarts I am still stuck in the optimizing apps loop
This is what it looks like when the flash.bat is executed:
Looking good, but you should also perform a factory reset in recovery. The flash.bat does not do this! (In fact, it doesn’t touch the data partition at all.)
Now I know how to get into the recovery menu thanks to the tip from @schmulschubiak “When you see “no command” screen, press again Power and VolumeUp, then leave Volume Up, then Power. Now you can see the recovery menu.”
Hi all,
I am having some serious trouble with the Fairphone 2. After installing the new update to Android 5.1 (I am not sure about the version and as I cannot access the phone I cannot verify this version) which has been released over the May 1st 2017 weekend the phone worked for a day and then rebooted after hanging during surfing with Firefox (I suspect Firefox as a root of this problem as I had that on another phone now too).
Now the phone reboots in a loop and starts to optimise the apps. First 8 apps, then 91 apps and then reboots again to do it again.
I’ve read the forums about the TWRP recovery and tried it, but unfortunately I get the “no command” error with the dead Android icon and the red warning sign.
I’ve tried to use Odin to reinstall the “fp2-sibon-17.03.0-blobs.tar” but not even this works. I am a Windows user and can do a lot with. But if I have to install a Ubuntu computer to be able to repair my phone I would not hesitate to. Though I can’t find a really useful instruction.
Happened to me as well, all because of that Google App and not setting the Assist entry to None.
There was no way around factory resetting the phone in the recovery menu – however, flashing the TWRP recovery image from FP Open with fastboot enabled me to connect the phone to the computer and save some data at least (mainly the whatsapp and pictures folder). USB Debug and therefore ADB was not possible.
Afterwards I flashed the stock recovery.img back, factory resetted the phone, however, after thinking about it overnight I decided to finally switch to FP Open and wait for that Android 6 update.
I have good news. The ADB and flash.bat did not flash the phone but I could reset the user settings. Afterwards the phone startet again and now I am reconfiguring it from scratch again.
I used the flashall switch on the fastboot.exe. But before you do so too, remember to backup all data or at least be aware that THIS SWITCH WILL DELETE ALL OF YOUR USER DATA.
The detailed instructions are found in here (refer to point 4):
Unfortunately my recovery mode is still non-functional. But I hope I will find a solution for this too.
There was a new Update today including the bootloop. The Updater App tells you to enable the Google App. I did so, Update seemed to work, Then I disabled the Google App again. After turning my FP2 off and on again it is now in a bootloop. It is probably necessary to do this:
I don’t know about the warning sign (I’m still on Android 5.1), but wasn’t Android robot + “no command” = the normal Android 6 Fairphone OS stock recovery mode (which works differently than before Android 6), in which case there are instructions for using it here?
Or is the warning sign the distinction between a working recovery mode and something bad?
I’m not sure why you installed the Google App from Open Gapps. Disabling an app does not uninstall it and installing it from recovery will not re-enable it.
If you disabled the Google App but didn’t set the Assist app to None, a factory reset is the only known way out.
Restoring a full backup will only work if you made it before disabling the Google App.
Restoring the files you copied from internal and external SD should not cause any problems.
OK, long time since the original post but for documentation purposes:
Restoring the TWRP backup (or rather every partition except the system after reinstalling Android 5) did not work.
I did some research into how I could extract data (like App data surch as text messages, contacts, etc.) from the backup and found out that the pro version of Titanium Backup and the free version of Nandroid Manager were supposed to do the trick if you have super user right (i.e. rooted the phone). Since I had flashed my phone several times by then I thought ‘Geronimo!’ and ‘Leroy Jenkins!’ alternately and decided to flash the Fairphone Open OS version available at the time (Android 5). The flashing worked. Once flashed I installed TitaniumPro and Nandroid Manager, restored my data from the TWRP backup with both (I think Nandroid Manager worked a tiny bit better, if memory serves). It worked great, by and large. I was even able to restore my apps although some app data was lost in the process. The update to Android 6 a couple of weeks later also worked brilliantly.
And that’s the story of how something I would tend to call a Google programming mistake made me switch to a less Google intense phone OS.
Upgrade to FP Open 17.06.4 renders phone useless (freezes once booted and reboots itself)