Locked fastboot and corrupted e/OS Fairphone6

[9and3]

Hello there!

I was super happy to receive my FP6 with e/OS murena installed. Unfortunately either after these 2 things I did, the phone is completely bricked:

• I updated to 3.0.4
• I enabled the linux terminal in developer mode (my bad)

I am now stucked in fastboot mode with the DEVICE-STATE - locked, with the (bootloader) get_unlock_ability: 0.
If I run in safe mode, I receive a message that the system is corrupted.

I cannot exit this fastboot mode nad the e/OS safemode does not help. I also tried adb shell su -c 'resetprop ro.boot.flash.locked 1' without any results.

Any help is very much appreciated and I do thank you in advance !
PS: I am losing my mind over this hellish loophole.

For cross-reference: Locked fastboot and corrupted e/OS Fairphone6 - Fairphone 6 - Fairphone Community Forum

[aibd]

Were you running these commands from within a terminal on the device? That is not from a terminal on a PC?

If you turn the phone off. Can you boot the phone into Bootloader ? Do you see a big green START on that screen with fastboot highlighted in Red?

Do you have a PC, Windows or Linux. Does this PC have platform-tools installed?

If you follow the hashtags now added to your OP you may get some insight into some fp6 “terms and methods”.

[9and3]

Thanks @aibd for your time!

@aibd

Were you running these commands from within a terminal on the device? That is not from a terminal on a PC?

Yes the command were running from a windows terminal.

@aibd

If you turn the phone off. Can you boot the phone into Bootloader ? Do you see a big green START on that screen with fastboot highlighted in Red?

Yes by pressing power button + volume down I can go into the Bootloader (lFastBoot Mode).

@aibd

Do you have a PC, Windows or Linux. Does this PC have platform-tools installed?

I am on windows right now. And yes it has all the platform-tools installed and all the drivers (event the optional for adb and google) are updated.

It seems that I am unable to unlock it since stuck in this bootloader and corrupted image loop. Would reinstall Android 15, enable OEM and reflash e/OS work?

[9and3]

The USB debugging was toggled before this. I am certain 100%.

@aibd

When you ran the unlock ability command was that from the PC or the 'on device terminal"?

This was from the terminal since the phone is completely bricked, I do not have terminal on the phone to have access.

Also wondering: the e/OS can be sideloaded on locked device? Because I just tried to flash the FPOS and it won’t work because the bootloader needs to be unlocked.

Basically, the only feature that wasn’t enabled in the developer settings was the OEM, but I wasn’t installing a new image so I didn’t enable it. But I believe it’s what makes the situation stuck.

[AnotherElk]

@9and3

I was super happy to receive my FP6 with e/OS murena installed.

@9and3

Also wondering: the e/OS can be sideloaded on locked device?

If you can still boot into recovery to initiate the sideloading, then yes.
But the builds from the install download pages are not for sideloading (they are for flashing with fastboot), you can get OTA files suitable for sideloading from the OTA server … https://ota.ecloud.global/api/v1/FP6/official/

@9and3

Basically, the only feature that wasn’t enabled in the developer settings was the OEM, but I wasn’t installing a new image so I didn’t enable it. But I believe it’s what makes the situation stuck.

Seems correct.

[9and3]

It worked! Thanks for pointing to the right image (I would have never found it for the slideload).

So to sum up, here’s what worked for me on my FP6 (e/OS Murena 3.0.4) + Windows terminal for sideloading with ADB:

Situation: locked bootloader and corrupted system message when trying to load normally, but being able to load the e/OS recovery from the bootloader.

1. If you are stuck in “Fairphone/Android logo” loading in alternation with the corrupted system message, hold the right button + left volume down for 15 seconds.
2. This will bring you to the bootloader, select the safemode
3. You will enter the recovery mode, select now the “update”, this will allow you to sideload an image for e/OS
4. Select via “adb” (if you have not enabled USB debugging before, you can do it now by going into the “advanced settings” of the recovery mode and enabling the ADB debugging option).
5. From your terminal (I was on Windows, be sure to update all the optional drivers as indicated here)
6. Download the sideloading image you want from the OTA server (e.g. this was for the 3.0.4) cudos to @AnotherElk
7. From the terminal run: adb sideload e-3.0.4-a15-20250708507307-official-FP6.zip . This will flash the update.
8. Reboot and it should work!

Big thanks to the e/OS and Fairphone community that was so reactive in figuring this out!

[Gaea]

Congrats!
Unintendedly you became an expert….
I can relate to your relief….