I think I (sort of) bricked my Fairphone 2

First up neither am I experienced with smartphones nor am I a computer geek so please have mercy :wink:

I followed this guide to install Sailfish OS on my Fairphone. I did everything until step 3. Then entered the command ā€œfastboot flash userdata userdata.imgā€ and it said thereā€™s an error. Something along the lines of ā€œsending sparse userdate failureā€. Since then the only thing I see on my phone is the Fairphone logo.

  • I can not turn the phone off

  • It does not respond to anything. (Holding the power button reboots)

  • The device doesnā€™t show up on my computer

I hope you guys can help me. Iā€™m completely desperate to get it to run again.

Did you try to take out the battery to reboot? And if so, what happened at reboot?

As for fixing a bricked phone, maybe you find some answers here:

or here:
https://fairphone.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/207914363

The only way to turn off the phone is to take out the battery.
When I put it back in, the boot loop resumes.

Can you boot into recovery? (Is there one with sailfish OS?) an do a factory reset?
You can enter it by pressing on and vol down or up, have to look it up, I forgot which one. The other one goes into fastbootā€¦

power + volume up = recovery
power + volume down = fastboot

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I think you can still access fastboot mode by pressing VOLUME DOWN + POWER BUTTON combination. At least, the description of the ā€œFairphone logo screen that canā€™t be shut downā€ matches the fastboot mode, for me.

If thatā€™s the case, your phone has a great possibility to be restored by following the steps for flashing the original flashable images for Fairphone 2 images here (advanced users section). Be sure to download the right file, ending with -img.zip, not any other (nor -ota.zip ended files)

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