FP4 stuck in "blue spinning dots" bootloop, want to rescue data

Help Fairphone 4
1

Hey everyone, I’m looking for whatever advice can be given for the following situation!

  • During normal usage, my phone crashed and has since been stuck in a bootloop, remaining on the spinning blue dots and occasionally returning to the Fairphone loading screen

  • Recovery Mode and Fastboot Mode are both accessible via button prompts, but Safe Mode is not

  • I believe Developer Mode isn’t active, and I have no idea whether USB Debug Mode is switched on - my only piece of knowledge with this is that “adb reboot” works, but ONLY when I’m on the sideload ADB screen.

  • Removing the SIM card or swapping it out with another did nothing

  • Removing the battery (1 minute, 15 minutes, overnight) did nothing

  • Leaving the boot cycle on for an extended period did nothing

  • Attempts to flash the image available on the Fairphone website isn’t working - direct sideloading via ADB can’t read the zip(?) and using the .bat file inside the zip fails as well

The only photos I have backed up are those I saved to handmade albums, and none of my notes are saved either - the Google account I set as the main account on the phone is so unused I cannot even correctly recall its exact email address.

I want to know if there’s any option to try and pull the data from Internal Storage so I can factory reset my phone with minimal losses, but

  1. I can’t figure out how “adb pull” works for the phone because I have no view of what the internal files look like, and most of the advice online assumes your phone works
  2. “adb pull” is apparently disabled in Recovery Mode anyways

If anyone has advice, I’m all ears. Cheers!

2

Hi and welcome to the forum.

My general understanding is that as the internal memory and any SD that is formatted as internal are encrypted, so the only way to retrieve data is to login first.

3

Welcome to the community :wave:

This doesn’t look good :grimacing:

adb pull won’t help you if you can’t get into normal userland (or have a recovery that can access userdata, which doesn’t exist).
As @anon9989719 already mentioned, storage is encrypted. You won’t be able to retrieve any data unless you can get the phone to boot.

The only option I see left is trying to get into Safe Mode some more times, but we’ve had similar cases before and the chances of that working are more or less zero, sorry.

4

Aw beans, this was my fear :frowning: at least I still have some family photos… I’ll try to access Safe Mode, just in case I can somehow get in. Thanks for the advice and the welcome!

1 Like
5

Here is a way an FP3 was switched on without a power button press, it may be worth a try and bypass something.

6

It does not work on a normal working FP4, tried it when I read this

1 Like
7

I’ve gone ahead and bit the bullet vis à vis resetting my phone. Thank you for all the advice everyone, wishing you all the best

2 Likes
8

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.