A Soft-Bricked Android Smartphone

Sometimes, if you are trying to root or otherwise update your Android device, and you don’t follow the proper instructions the device ends up soft-bricked. What exactly does that mean and what you can do about it is the subject of this guide.

What does Soft-Bricked mean?

This just means that when a device is booted up but can’t get into a home screen. What happens is it may be gone into bootloop or stuck at boot screen.

Soft-bricked Android devices can be recovered in three ways:

Flashing a new firmware
Resetting the device to factory settings
Restoring a Nandroid Backup

Of these three options, the two have the disadvantage of also wiping internal Sdcard’s data. Bricking can be a real mess if your device doesn’t have an external SDcard and you’re your important data is in your internal storage.

If you have soft bricked your Android device, you will now need a way to grab data out of the phone’s internal storage. In the following post we’ll be going through ways to remedy this problem and recover your data.

Remember, we will need to use a custom recovery here, so you need to have one installed. For most devices you need a ROM manager to install a recovery. For some specific devices, like the HTC, Sony and Nexus you are going to need Andorid ADB and Fastboot. For Samsung Galaxy devices, recoveries come in .tar.md5 format and can be flashed using Odin. Fastboot/Download modes.

Recover data from a Soft-Bricked Android smartphone:

When you have installed custom recovery on the device, open it using the specified method for your device.
When you are in custom recovery, you will find a variety of options. Choose the one for the custom recovery you have:
- CMW Recovery:
  - Mounts & Storage > Yes.
  - Mount USB storage or the option depending upon your choice

TWRP Recovery
- Mount>USB Storage

Connect the phone and the PC using a data cable
When your phone and PC is connected, USB Storage/Internal Storage should come up in folder view.
Copy all your files to your PC

That’s all you need to do. You should now be able to recover the data stored in the internal storage of your Android device.

Have you soft-bricked your Android device by accident? What did you do?

Share your experience in the comment box below.

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