I think I (sort of) bricked my Fairphone 2

[MarcSonny]

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

I followed this guide to install Sailfish OS on my Fairphone. I did everything until step 3. Then entered the command “fastboot flash userdata userdata.img” and it said there’s an error. Something along the lines of “sending sparse userdate failure”. 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 doesn’t show up on my computer

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

[freibadschwimmer]

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:

FP2 Bricked - Recovery Help

Hi guys, so I tried rooting my FP2 with KingRoot and SuperSuMe yesterday only to realize that it get’s stuck on the loading screen and doesn’t boot anymore. So I did some research and found this and this, both related to the FP1, but I figured the procedure qould be the same in general. So I can boot into recovery and open an adb connection from my windows PC, all I seem to be missing, is a fresh ROM to flash to my phone via sideload. Where would I get one? I actually do have a second FP2 at …

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

[MarcSonny]

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

[lklaus]

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 fastboot…

[paulakreuzer]

@lklaus

pressing on and vol down or up, have to look it up

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

[Roboe]

I think you can still access fastboot mode by pressing VOLUME DOWN + POWER BUTTON combination. At least, the description of the “Fairphone logo screen that can’t be shut down” matches the fastboot mode, for me.

If that’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)