Hardbricked Fairphone 1

Hello there,

before hand - I know the difference between a soft bricked phone and a hard bricked one - I went to the Recovery Menu several times before to reset my userdata. But now I cannot even do that.

What happened?
I tried to install the latest update Kola Nut 1.8.7 to my Fairphone, because I wanted to fix the Stagefright thing. So first tried to let the installer do the udate for me. That did fail. It started to download the updated. Then a message shows up Cache is full. Then when I tried to press the Install button another message displayed Cannot find /cache/update_xxxx.zip.

I started to investigate a solution for that issue, but was unable to. Most hints I got were directed to: “Perform a manual update.” So this is what I tried to do yesterday.

The article Manually install Fairphone OS for the Fairphone 1 was rather helpful and I was able to follow the steps 1 through 11.

The Problem
The phone does not start and will not enter recovery mode again. All I now see is a blue screen, nothing else. The only way to power down the phone is via removing the battery. Then when I try to start the phone into recovery mode (holding the volume up + power key for 10 seconds), I again get a blue screen. Nothing else.

So I started to search about what to do with a hardbricked fairphone and came up on a page on XDA Developers that deals with the topic. When I try to download the described software I steadily get the note from my Firefox that this page has been reported for unwanted software and is therefore blocked.

This is why I post here to get help. I am reluctant to download ransom-ware that may or may not help me with the problem.

Do you have any other ideas?
Otherwise, it is a Fairphone 1. I could hand it back to the company for recycling and get a new one. The two years are over :wink: But that way not my inital plan …

Update 1
I searched the XDA Developer forums a bit, I found a more recent release of the SP Flash Tool. When trying to download this, no hint about unwanted software and my virus scanner keeps silent.

Update 2
The drivers do not work with Windows 10. The installation aborts. Used my laptop, still running Windows 7.

I have not used the XDA software myself but we recommended it here on the forum many times and never heard about anything bad that happened after installing it. If you can’t get your browser to unblock the site maybe someone else can share the file with you?

Thank you for the reply, I found a more recent version of the SP Flash Tool on the XDA Forum. That one I was able to download without any issue. I will proceed with the description about how to solve the hardbrick as described in their article. I assume the article just aged.

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