FP2 bricked during update to 1.4.2 - no recovery mode

Do you mean, that also fastboot cannot find the phone any more? Or just your file browser?
Because if you boot into fastboot mode, black screen with FP logo would be as expected. Thus if fastboot still finds the device, you can try to flash the system again.

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It might not be related, but it seems that 1.4.2 erase my Twrp recovery and replace it by the standard recovery. And I had trouble to boot on it, it is not the same behavior than Twrp. It might be something like holding power + sound up for 10s, then the phone reboot with classical FP logo, but releasing button at this second reboot might get you to recovery. Or something more complicated, I am not sure.

I had to do it several times to finally boot in recovery and discover that Twrp was not on it anymore.

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Wasn’t that to be expected? FP OS comes with standard recovery. Only FP Open OS has TWRP.

I thought it should be recognized by the file browser, or at least my operating system.
I googled what fastboot is, and I’ll try tomorrow to see if I can get it recognize my FP2.
I tried what @NicoM said : press power+up for 10 second and release precisely when it shuts down. I managed once to have my windows 7 recognize an android USB device without being able to find drivers to run it. But now I don’t manage to have it anymore, it looks quite random.
It already sounds less catastrophic than expected.

I try now to follow the tutorial "4. Flash the binary image from a computer"


I could install fastboot and adb on my ubuntu laptop.
I removed the battery, pushed power and volume- buttons and plugged the battery back. Then I connected the phone.
I enter “adb devices” in the shell but it doesn’t list any device.

Now the phone changes behavior as if the battery were down :

  1. Battery in, When the phone is on and I unplug the usb, it stays on screen Fairphone powered by android
  2. USB off, When I put back the battery and try to start the phone (with any combination of buttons) nothing happens
  3. battery in, when I plug the cable nothing happens during 2s and then the red led is on for one second, finally I’m back to the step 1.
    Because of step 2) I cannot apply the steps to access fastbootmode as described in the tutorial.

I wonder if the battery can charge although the red led is off. I’ll leave my phone on with battery and cable in, hoping that it will charge during the night.

I’m also waiting for an answer from after sales service.
Thanks all for your answers, let me know if you have an idea.

In fastboot you have to enter “fastboot devices” if you want to check if the pc finds it.
To get into fastboot mode you need to press vol. Down + power. Then, when the screen is black with Fairphone logo, you can check if the PC finds it.

I made a tutorial for recovering data from a soft-bricked Fairphone 2 (with access to fastboot mode) that could be of your interest for backing your data before reflashing:

Just in case something goes wrong.

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Hi Gauthier67,
Hi Community,

my wife’s FP2 is having exactly the same issue! (I’m using FP1 1st edition and never had such a bad situation, even during the first months.)
I’m getting more and more the impression that software QA at fairphone is pretty random…
Real bad timing, since our telephone is also not running, due to DSL problems…

So what to do now, with a phone that doesn’t seem to react on anything in a predictable way…??
Any suggestions? How does fastboot help?

Thanks!

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I can not find a recovery.img in the update-package. Where? Or: how did you update?

I downloaded the update package via updater, did the update via TWRP - the easiest way - and my TWRP-recovery is still on my phone.

Yes, FP OS comes with standard recovery, but I had Twrp from a while, and non of the previous update change it.[quote=“Spielmops, post:10, topic:18965”]
I can not find a recovery.img in the update-package. Where? Or: how did you update?
[/quote]
Exactly, I don’t understand how my Twrp was removed.
I was on 1.4.2RC with root and Twrp (the one from FP Open OS, not Twrp 3).
Then I downloaded the update zip, I opened it with Updater, that says thath I need more than 80% of battery. I was at 70% (and tired) so I decided to install it with Twrp. I reboot, but I was not able to enter recovery, after 10+sec with volUP/power, the phone was just rebooting. I decided to reboot normally the phone, it did the “updating your software”, like Dalvik cache was wiped. I reboot again, try harder to enter recovery and at the end I was able to enter recovery but it was not Twrp anymore, it was the standard one, third edition.

Not precisely actually, I don’t really remember when I released the button, I am just sure that it was after at least one or two reboot cycle.

No - hold it - hold it - hold it until you see the intro-screen from TWRP. Precisly you can release your fingers earlier, but to be sure that it works write it this way.

I never said that :frowning:
Indeed normally it is how I did it. But with the last update, Twrp was magically removed so waiting for the Twrp logo leads to reboot the phone.

[quote=“NicoM, post:13, topic:18965”]
magically
[/quote]Great! So what app do you use for such magic. what can the magic do? Produce some beer? Better battery? New girl friend?
:wink:

Nop, it is just like the rabbit and the hat thing: “Look, this is Twrp. Pay closed attention… Voila, Twrp is not here anymore!”

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I don’t have TWRP installed, but I have bricked my Fairphone by trying to update to 1.4.2.

The notification came as normal, so I used the updater app, and it’s been stuck in a bootloop since.

Similar problem in this thread: https://forum.fairphone.com/t/update-1-4-2-cant-open-dev-permission-denied/18994

I can confirm this behaviour on FP Open OS 16.05. I downloaded the fastboot version, unzipped the stand-alone images and just flashed system/cache/userdata. Afterwards my recovery switched to TWRP 2.8 and replaced my newer TWRP 3.0!

Solution (in my special case):
After flashing, DO NOT restart system and immediately boot into your recovery instead! TWRP 3.0 will be still present and shows a dialogue whether to allow modifications on system. Confirm this and TWRP is able to prevent to be overwritten by the system!

So now I have fastboot and adb installed on my ubuntu. I can see a device connected to through fastboot.
But when I type “sudo fastboot -u update FP2-gms54-1.3.6-img.zip” in the shell, the update fails :

archive does not contain 'boot.sig’
archive does not contain 'recovery.sig’
archive does not contain ‘system.sig’

Bootloader Version…:
Baseband Version…:
Serial Number…: XXXXXXX

checking product…
OKAY [ 0.002s]
sending ‘boot’ (13662 KB)…
OKAY [ 0.431s]
writing ‘boot’…
OKAY [ 0.145s]
sending ‘recovery’ (12292 KB)…
OKAY [ 0.388s]
writing ‘recovery’…
OKAY [ 0.138s]
sending ‘system’ (919305 KB)…
FAILED (remote: data too large)
finished. total time: 1.111s

Any idea on how to bypass this “FAILED (remote: data too large)” error?

The file you used is not the latest version. Though I don’t know if that caused the problems. Apparently the newest version is not yet linked on the website.

Hi,

I also got the fastboot link from my Mac. So what I did is the following steps with no success. Each time, the fastboot process went smooth without any error, but each time, the normal reboot ended up with the same lasting “Fairphone / powered by Android” black boot screen.

  1. Just installed the recovery.img from the FP Open OS, using "fastboot flash recovery recovery.img, as a way to install TWRP as stated by Roboe.
  2. assuming that the boot process wasn’t working, I also flashed the boot.img from same version in the same way: "fastboot flash boot boot.img
  3. lastly, I did the 4th method from the manual install page. Unlike Gauthier67, I used the -w option and not the -u.

Here is a hardcopy of the fastboot output for step 3. There must be something else wrong with the phone… I’ll file a service request and wait.

bassan:~ lomig$ fastboot -w update FP2-gms54-1.3.6-img.zip
target reported max download size of 536870912 bytes
archive does not contain ‘boot.sig’
archive does not contain ‘recovery.sig’
archive does not contain ‘system.sig’
archive does not contain ‘vendor.img’
Creating filesystem with parameters:
Size: 27845963776
Block size: 4096
Blocks per group: 32768
Inodes per group: 8176
Inode size: 256
Journal blocks: 32768
Label:
Blocks: 6798331
Block groups: 208
Reserved block group size: 1024
Created filesystem with 11/1700608 inodes and 150772/6798331 blocks
Creating filesystem with parameters:
Size: 671088640
Block size: 4096
Blocks per group: 32768
Inodes per group: 8192
Inode size: 256
Journal blocks: 2560
Label:
Blocks: 163840
Block groups: 5
Reserved block group size: 39
Created filesystem with 11/40960 inodes and 5256/163840 blocks

Bootloader Version…:
Baseband Version…:
Serial Number…: fbecf69c

checking product…
OKAY [ 0.002s]
sending ‘boot’ (13662 KB)…
OKAY [ 0.431s]
writing ‘boot’…
OKAY [ 0.316s]
sending ‘recovery’ (12292 KB)…
OKAY [ 0.388s]
writing ‘recovery’…
OKAY [ 0.282s]
erasing ‘system’…
OKAY [ 0.308s]
sending sparse ‘system’ (522736 KB)…
OKAY [ 16.395s]
writing ‘system’…
OKAY [ 14.189s]
sending sparse ‘system’ (396568 KB)…
OKAY [ 12.490s]
writing ‘system’…
OKAY [ 14.398s]
erasing ‘userdata’…
OKAY [ 5.716s]
sending ‘userdata’ (139025 KB)…
OKAY [ 4.354s]
writing ‘userdata’…
OKAY [ 3.752s]
erasing ‘cache’…
OKAY [ 0.204s]
sending ‘cache’ (12520 KB)…
OKAY [ 0.394s]
writing ‘cache’…
OKAY [ 0.327s]
rebooting…

finished. total time: 73.951s

[update] After filing a request, I received a notice automatically closing it along with an email giving the advice I already followed, and stating that “we’re currently dealing with an overwhelming backlog of requests”. I’m afraid I’m not going to see my FP2 up and running any day soon. :cry:

Running fastboot -w update softwareupdate.zip with the -w flag you are overwritting the recovery and boot flashed on the previous steps PLUS deleting all your userdata from the phone. ALL.

$ fastboot help ... -w Erase userdata and cache (and format if supported by partition type).

I really hope you made a backup of important stuff from TWRP before executing the third step you describe. That was the only purpose of my tutorial.

And why did you flash TWRP as recovery without using it? The file you downloaded holds the images for the whole OS, so flashing it all has to remove the just flashed recovery and boot.img.

Instead you could have used TWRP to backup the images “system”, “cache”, “boot” and “userdata” and then flash the images from the zip-file (without “recovery”) via TWRP.

Try again, this way you’ll learn …