FP5 bricked or not?

/e/OS Devices Fairphone
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1

Hi !
Having recently received my FP5 with /e/OS, I’ve been playing around with it a bit and, above all, I wanted to transfer my data from my old phone.
To do this I use Neo Backup.
It needs root rights to work properly. So I followed the official procedure for unlocking the bootloader, then the instructions in the following post to install Magisk.
Out of ignorance of the risks, I wanted to relock the boot … without un-root. So, when I rebooted, I got a warning message saying that the system had been altered and that it would not boot normaly again.
Since then it has been stuck on the bootloader.

$ fastboot oem device-info
(bootloader) Verity mode: true
(bootloader) Device unlocked: false
(bootloader) Device critical unlocked: false
(bootloader) Charger screen enabled: true
OKAY [  0.001s]
Finished. Total time: 0.001s

And it’s unlockable :

$ fastboot flashing unlock
FAILED (remote: 'Flashing Unlock is not allowed')
fastboot: error: Command failed

$ fastboot flashing unlock_critical
FAILED (remote: 'Flashing Unlock is not allowed')
fastboot: error: Command failed

My mistake was this, i don’t remove root before relocking :sob:

Any idea to help me ?

2

Will it boot into recovery?
If you could get into recovery you could sideload a copy of your existing OS to boot in the other slot.

3

Hi,
Sorry for the delay.
Unfortunatly i can’t change the active slot :

$ fastboot --set-active=b
Setting current slot to ‘b’ FAILED (remote: ‘Slot Change is not allowed in Lock State’)
fastboot: error: Command failed

I found a similar case for an FP4 that ended up being supported by Fairphone.
I’m going to ask Murena for support and if they don’t have a solution for me, I’ll contact Fairphone directly.

4

That (blocked boot because of corrupted device) is exactly what I was running into → flashed /e/OS, installed Magisk, installed the magisk-patched boot.img and then wanted to try to lock the bootloader and got stuck - but I just locked with the first command and not with lock_critical as well, so there might be a difference…

In the end I could re-unlock (“fastboot flash unlock” didn’t show me the failed command like you posted), re-flash boot.img, etc. and work again with that Fairphone.

I would at least expect that “fastboot flash unlock” would work… Why shouldn’t it?

(I am wondering, why we users cannot have secure-boot and root access at the same time… just a little sick about how mobile devices work nowadays)

1 Like
5

A few news items.
Thanks to Murena’s support and for a very modest fee (€50 including postage), I’ve got a working phone again. I don’t know what they did to get it working again, but everything is OK.
I went through the rooting process again and everything went well!

Many thanks again!

3 Likes
6

For the record, I did receive confirmation from Murena support that the phone could not be repaired by myself. So the return to the after-sales service was essential.