FP2 stuck at boot logo

Help Fairphone 2
#1

Well, I know I should not have been messing around with a functioning device, but the idea of installing a different OS on my FP2 was just too tempting…

My FP2 is now stuck at the Fairphone logo, not booting into the OS. The phone is still charging (I can see the battery animation when it is switched off) and I can still boot into recovery mode. I have already performed a “Wipe data/factory reset” and a “Wipe cache partition” in the recovery mode but I am still stuck at the Fairphone logo…

The error occurred after I tried to downgrade to Fairphone OS 1.1.7 via the micro SD card. I had downloaded the image from the FP website and then tried to install it via the recovery mode, which failed with an error. This has presumably corrupted the partitioning of my FP.

Any ideas how the problem can be fixed?

Best wishes and many thanks in advance, Jochen.

#2

As far as i understood a downgrade is not as easily possible. Depending on the latest version you had installed, you may have updated the baseband firmware as well (with v. 1.4.2), which I don’t know if it is compatible with older FPOS versions.

I would thus recommend to manually install the FPOS preferably via fastboot (method 4 on the support page), and in case you applied the baseband update, to install the latest FPOS version.

1 Like
#3

You can try a Soft Reset by holding down the power button for more than 10s. I have sometimes (1 of 5 bootups) noticed this behavior since the last OpenOS update (16.06) and after a Soft Reset the device is booting normally.
My device is rooted but I think this isn’t the reason. Probably there is a dependency to the charge state of battery because I think that this behavior comes more often after fully recharging the battery but I haven’t yet tested it sufficiently.

#4

Thanks for your help. I finally solved the problem and traced down the problem. I will post a detailled description of the solution later today, as I feel many other users might face similar problems…

#5

OK, so here is how I solved the problem: It all boils down to outdated versions of the fastboot binaries… But first things first.

I had wanted to install Sailfish OS on my Fairphone 2 and for that reason I first needed to downgrade the Fairphone OS from version 1.5.1 to version 1.1.7. I first tried to downgrade via fastboot so I downloaded the flash image for version 1.1.7 and used “fastboot -w update ‘flashable image filename’ " to load the image file to the device. Unfortunately the process exited after some time with the following error:

sending ‘system’ (xxxxxxxxx KB)…
FAILED (remote: data too large)

Well, different from what I had suspected in my first post, this is what actually softbricked my Fairphone, because fastboot had already started writing the image to the phone, thus overwriting parts of the old operating system. When fastboot exited with the above mentioned error, it left my phone with an unbootable operating system. But actually I did not notice then… I merely saw the error, did not try to reboot but tried to flash the operating system from the SD memory card immediately, which also failed. But at that point, the phone had already been softbricked…

So, when I noticed the phone did not boot anymore, I tried to use fastboot to load different image files from the Fairphone website to the phone, however, all attempts failed with the same error:

sending ‘system’ (xxxxxxxxx KB)…
FAILED (remote: data too large)

I tried on Windows, using “Minimal ADB and Fastboot”, and I tried on Linux, using the packages “android-tools-adb” and “android-tools-fastboot” from the phablet-team repos, but I ended up with the same error on either OS… Only then I realized that the current version number of adb from “Minimal ADB and Fastboot” and from the phablet-team repos is still 1.0.32 while the current version number from Google is already 1.0.36.

Actually, all I had to do was update adb and fastboot with the latest versions from Google. Then fastboot loaded the image file to my phone like a charm, no more errors and I finally had a working phone again.

In many forums on the web you will be referred to either “Minimal ADB and Fastboot” on Windows or “android-tools-adb” and “android-tools-fastboot” from the phablet-team repos on LInux. So be careful because they do not necessarily come with the latest versions of adb and fastboot and that might eventually softbrick your phone.

Hope this post saves one or two of you from softbricking their FPs :slight_smile:

1 Like
#6