Fairphone dead? Can't access Recovery Mode

[Einspieler]

Hi dear Fairphone-users!

My wifes Fairphone 2 (3.5 years old) started to act weird yesterday: First we updated it to the latest Fairphone OS-version, that worked flawlessly. Then a few hours later it rebooted randomly (She was using it while it happend - but that happened often since we upgraded to android 7 - my FP2 does that too) and got stuck in a rebootloop. I could go into recovery mode and manually reboot it, but it would just return to its loop. I took the battery out for the night. But that didn’t change anything. So figured I had to reinstall the whole OS - luckily I could make a backup before trying to make a factory reset, because after some time the recover mode started to crash…

And after some random reboots, I couldn’t access recovery mode anymore. Now it just shows the black Fairphone screen with “powered by Android” underneath it.

Next Step: Fastboot. I could and still can access fastboot. I also can manually install Fairphone OS - at least I get confirmation it has been installed - but the phone doesn’t boot it. And still: I can’t accees recovery mode. I even tried to install Ubuntu touch - just to see if I could get TWRM at least installed and working again.

So… yeah… I’m figuring it’s a hardware problem? Well at least that’s my question… did I try all software solutions? Or is there something anybody can think of to try.
I even swapped all modules from the broken phone with my still working FP2, but I figure it must be the main module then…

[AnotherElk]

@Einspieler

did I try all software solutions?

Installing the Fairphone 2 from scratch in case of failure / Komplette Neuinstallation des Fairphone 2 im Fehlerfall

Updates could go wrong, upgrades could go wrong, own experiments could go wrong, any given thing could go wrong … and the Fairphone 2 doesn’t boot anymore, doesn’t update anymore, doesn’t do any given important thing anymore. Updates können schief gehen, Upgrades können schief gehen, eigene Experimente können schief gehen, irgendetwas anderes kann schief gehen … und das Fairphone 2 bootet nicht mehr, updatet sich nicht mehr, oder tut irgendetwas anderes wichtiges nicht mehr. If even a factory …

[Einspieler]

I tried that - with different TWRP-images - and it just won’t boot into recovery mode.

[sm01man]

I’m no expert but that sounds like the symptoms of the storage failing, you did an update which does loads of write cycles, and it sounds like its given up. I have known of phones which can at first go into recovery mode, and then not also. However I could be wrong as I say.

Edit: Flash storage has a maximum number of write cycles, (not an exact figure its just when its estimated to break,) as it wears out, and I think the phone reached this when you flashed the update which could be why you are experiencing this.