I need some advice on how to recover the photos stored in the internal memory of my Fairphone 5.
A few days ago the phone fell to the ground. Since then, it powers on but gets stuck at the very first boot screens, with the green Fairphone animation (“gif”), and it never goes further. The device also gets quite hot if I leave it in this state.
The only thing I can do is enter the Android recovery menu. From there I can see the usual options: reboot, apply update from ADB or SD card, wipe data/factory reset, etc.
The problem is that if I perform a factory reset, I will lose everything in the internal memory, including my photos. That’s the one thing I really want to keep. I don’t mind losing apps or settings — I just need to get my photo files back.
From what I understand, the only way to reinstall or repair the system without wiping the internal memory would be to use an OTA update package (via ADB sideload or SD card). Unfortunately, I only see OTA packages officially published for the Fairphone 3, not for the Fairphone 5.
So my questions are:
Is there an OTA (or any update package) available for the Fairphone 5 that can be sideloaded via ADB or SD card, without erasing the internal storage?
Has anyone managed to recover files (especially photos) from a Fairphone 5 stuck in this kind of bootloop?
Are there alternative ways to access the internal memory before performing a factory reset?
Any guidance or shared experiences would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you very much for your reply. What a pity if the only way to recover the data is through a physical intervention on the storage.
Yes, I have just opened the Fairphone, checked each part, reassembled it, but unfortunately the problem remains: it still gets stuck on the green Fairphone boot animation.
I will wait and see if someone from the community or from Fairphone can give me some good news and a way to access the data from recovery boot.
Sorry if I’m duplicating content, but my issue is related to the very active thread FP5 not booting after update to Android 15. I’m posting here just to show the relation, and I’ll try to close the other thread to avoid duplicates.
”I think my Fairphone 5 was already updated to Android 15 a few weeks ago. On August 16th, after the phone accidentally fell on the ground, it stopped working with exactly the same symptoms described here: it freezes at the boot animation and I can only access the recovery menu.
At the very moment of the fall, I noticed that the power button (and fingerprint sensor) got stuck. After a while it became responsive again — now it does perform the on/off action — but apparently the fall must have damaged it, and since then I haven’t been able to boot into Android.
So far, I’m just waiting for an official solution from Fairphone, because in my situation a factory reset would mean losing the photos stored in the internal memory.