my phone will not boot after restarting to install an update a couple days ago. i am running the stock fairphone software, unlocked bootloader, usb debugging turned on. when i try to boot it, i get the bootloader unlock warning screen, fairphone logo screen, a half second flash of the dots booting animation followed by a black illuminated screen that turns itself off after like five minutes. i try to boot it again, same thing happens. no idea what went wrong because i set it to restart at 2am and plugged it in to charge like i usually do, so i only discovered this when my alarm didn’t go off in the morning. i am far from being a proper computery person, but i believe the bastard has softbricked itself.
i did not expect this to happen when installing a stock update and i, the silly goose i am, had not backed up my phone in a couple months. i would very much like to get specifically my contacts and photo library (which are not backed up to my google account, yes i have checked) backed up to my laptop before i factory reset it to try and solve the problem.
troubleshooting i have done already to try and solve the boot problem:
-removing the battery and trying to reboot
-rebooting from recovery mode
-rebooting from fastboot using my laptop
-taking the battery out, leaving it for a few hours, trying above things again, to no avail.
i think i will try to use twrp to make a nandroid backup, but the guides i’m reading here and here mention needing a zip file, which i cannot find from the forum post on twrp for fairphone 4 (cannot link it, i am a new user who has used up my link quota above).
do i need it? can i go ahead and boot into twrp temporarily without it? do i need to convert the non-.img file in the google drive into a zip file somehow? is there a better way to do this that i haven’t discovered? am i on an utter fool’s errand and should give up hope of ever recovering my data? please, sages of fairphone wisdom who know more than me, please give me your opinions.
You don’t need any ZIP to boot temporally to TWRP ( fastboot boot twrp.img).
It’s anyway not advised to permanently install TWRP on FP4 as it’s not fully supported…
well that’s incredibly unfortunate. do you know of any other custom recovery that would work? or a different way to get a backup altogether? could i pull the encrypted data and move it back on after i’ve factory reset it? will probably start asking data recovery companies if not, because losing all my phone’s data would suuuuck for me rn.
admittedly didn’t pay attention to what exact update it was, but having had a look through yeah it seems like that’s probably what did it. which refocuses my question to “how can i get my data off the phone before resetting”. thanks so much for linking this post!
