How to Unbrick Your Android Phone: 4 Methods for Recovery

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How to Unbrick Your Android Phone: 4 Methods for Recovery

So you’ve bricked your phone. You flashed a ROM, installed a mod, tweaked a system file, or did something else—and now your phone won’t boot.

The steps for how to unbrick a phone depend on how it’s bricked in the first place. There are two categories of bricked phone:

The soft brick. The phone freezes on the Android boot screen, gets stuck in a boot loop, or just goes straight to recovery. So long as something happens when you press the power button, it’s soft bricked. The good news is these are pretty easy to fix.

The hard brick. You push the power button and nothing happens. Hard bricks can be caused by issues like attempting to flash an incompatible ROM or kernel, and there’s normally no software solution for them. Hard bricks are terrible news, but fortunately they’re quite rare.

Most likely you’re soft bricked, and you’ll see something like the image above. While the differences in how various devices work make it hard to come up with a catch-all solution to unbrick Android, there are four common tricks you can try to get yourself back on track:

Before you get started, make sure your phone and computer are set up and ready with the proper tools.

Chances are you already have most of the tools you need to unbrick your phone. They’re the same tools you used to root your device and flash ROMs, so you should already be familiar with how they work. Even so, double-check before you begin.

Most important is a custom recovery. You likely installed this when you rooted your phone, but it can sometimes get overwritten by the stock recovery, or wiped entirely. If you do need to reinstall it, we recommend going with TWRP. It’s a fully featured custom recovery that’s to easy to use, and has builds for most popular devices.

Next, you might need Fastboot and ADB. These are commonly used for rooting and flashing system mods, and you can get both from the Android Developers website. Check our primer on how to use Fastboot and ADB if you aren’t familiar with them.

And finally, some manufacturers use special software to flash factory images. Hopefully you can avoid doing this, but if you need to you can use Odin for Samsung, the LG Flash Tool for LG devices, and the HTC Sync Manager for HTC. You can also try the ZTE Unbrick Tool if you’ve got a ZTE device.

Most of these tools will let you fix a bricked Android phone using a PC. However, you can often do the job directly on the phone itself.

One of the most likely causes of soft bricking your phone is when you have problems when flashing a custom ROM

Thinking about installing a custom Android ROM? You might be in for more than you expect. Here are common issues to consider.

This is referred to as a “dirty flash,” and occurs when you choose to forego the inconvenience of having to restore your apps and data by flashing a new ROM on top of your old one. As a general rule, you can get away with it if you’re flashing a newer version of your existing ROM, but you must always wipe your data whenever you flash a different ROM.

Fortunately, it’s easy to fix—as long as you’ve backed up your phone properly. If you haven’t, well, you’ve learned an important lesson the hard way. Follow these steps:

Check the box marked Data (you can wipe the system, ART cache, and cache again too), then hit Confirm

Wiping your data effectively performs a factory reset, but it shouldn’t clear your internal storage or SD card (although, again, you should back it up just to be safe). When you restart your phone, you’ll see the Android setup screen. After entering your Google account information, your apps should begin reinstalling automatically.

If you need to, you can restore your data from your Nandroid backup. See the Restore a Nandroid Backup section below.

The Xposed Framework is one of the simplest ways to mod your phone, but it’s also one of the most dangerous. The best Xposed modules

The Xposed Framework is one of the best reasons to root Android, and these Xposed modules add awesome functionality.

are so easy to install—many of them are available in the Play Store—that they lull you into a false sense of security. It’s unlikely anyone makes a Nandroid backup before installing a new Xposed module, even though they can brick your phone.

The best way to deal with these problems is with the Xposed Uninstaller. This is a small flashable ZIP that you can install through the recovery to remove Xposed from your device.

If you don’t already have it on your phone, you can put it on an SD card, or you might be able to copy it over using the ADB push method:

Launch the command prompt (Windows) or Terminal (Mac) and use the cd command to change the directory to where you have adb installed.

None of these solutions will undo any chan…