Yesterday, my Fairphone 4 randomly turned off in my pocket. When trying to turn it on again, the Fairphone logo appears, then it is stuck on the 4 blue dots turning. I tried recharging the phone, took out SIM and SD, and went to recovery mode to reboot the system from there. Any other ideas (preferably ones where I don’t loose my data in the end)?
Do you have the bootloader unlocked? If not, I guess the only way is a factory reset via recovery (=data loss)…
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I’d try #dic:safemode first, but that was rarely successful in the past 
Let’s hope this isn’t another brick 
Oh, and welcome to the community BTW 
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If the system doesn’t boot it doesn’t matter what OS you are running on your PC, you don’t get your data back.
There’s no magic protocol running Linux will give you. You can decide to use it for several reasons (I do), but it won’t help you here, the relevant tooling works just fine on other OSes (some problems with M1/2 Macs though apparently).
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Booting a live-install on an USB stick to access partitions on a PC is absolutely not applicable to Android. That works because you can mount the partitions on the Linux system that you booted your PC into.
- You can’t mount the partitions on an Android phone over USB, that functionality doesn’t get exposed
- The bootloader is locked by default, so you can’t install anything on the phone to rescue the data
- Unlocking the bootloader wipes userdata
- If the bootloader is unlocked you could install a different OS or recovery (TWRP) to access the data
- Which doesn’t help, userdata is encrypted, TWRP can’t access it and you won’t be able to decrypt it because the key is stored in a TPM on the phone
Great decision on running Linux, I’ve been happy with it for years, but it won’t help here.
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This is exactly the same problem that I have encountered yesterday and have tried the same as you to get it started. I wonder if it’s a software issue?
Thank you all for your replies. I tried safemode, didn‘t work. I contacted the fairphone support and they suggested the same, or factory reset. I am currently waiting for a response from them, I guess then I‘ll have to proceed with the reset 
@Delboyo glad that I‘m at least not alone in this!
Sorry if there might be no other solution than a #dic:factorydatareset.
But in any case you should also #contactsupport so that they’re aware of the problem and may analyze it further!
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Waiting for a reply from them.
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This problem sounds like the following:
Their solution in the end was a factory reset. 
Taking together Delboyo (originally posted here), bll (here) and waterfall that’s three similar cases.
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just a humble advice
never save data on a system that does not belong to you .
keep important things on external drives ,sdcards or usbstick
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and yes… if no boot then no solution