HTC Android Boot-Loop, Constant Restart

The white screen... buzz.  Blackness.  Then it starts up again... The white screen... buzz. Blackness.

Look Ma, No Phone!
It's know and "boot-loop", an ongoing chain.  I had it last night with my HTC Evo 4G.   After an hour and a half of taking the battery out and putting it back, taking the SD card out and putting it back, leaving the SD card out, etc., and being unable to even get into the boot menu (pressing the power button on top simultaneously with the volume button) for a few dozen minutes, I was frustrated.  No, it wasn't rooted or any of the other Sprint excuses, except that the memory was probably too full (more common when I cannot remove bloatware like NFL and SprintZone and the awful dreaded infamous "Nova" program that comes pre-loaded and cannot be ditched).  Most of the apps I'd moved to the SD card when I could, but sometimes it's just one little additional app, or app upgrade, that tips the boat over.



As an American, I began thinking about a new phone.  Has my "2-year replacement" kicked in?  Or my 1 year warranty, does it still apply?  If you have a solution for <1 a="" and="" contract="" for="" phone="" solution="" upgrade="" year="">2 years, how can your society sustain repairpeople?  Of course, my android phone fell right in between, and I did find others in the same boat online.

The most prominent solutions offered at the Sprint and Android phone blogs, chatrooms and forums and guides was to exchange it.  From "Anything Android" Kg.money.net:
I got my ‘new’ Evo a couple days ago, and while I don’t know whether it’s actually new or just refurbished (they claimed not to know either), it *appears* to be brand new.  At any rate, I’ve not seen the Evo reboot loop once so far!  Now, to be fair, it took a few months to see it the first time, but I’m hoping for the best!  Hopefully, it was just an early manufacturing bug or something.
This is a $400 phone which is repairable enough to sell, even with a broken screen, for $265.  But plenty of Americans were lapping up the excuse to go get a new Samsung Galaxy III.



The people who did stick with it eventually cleared the cache and reset the phone... losing all the apps and data that were not backed up on the SD card.   That's what I did, eventually.  But here's a couple of pieces of advice:

1.  It was the end of the day, and my phone was not fully charged.  It's over a year old, so the battery life is questionable.   I would strongly urge people who have the bootloop a the end of a long day charge the thing overnight.  It's possible that it needs juice to make it over the boot-up-hill.   Booting and vibrating runs the battery down.

2.  Don't give up on the pushing the power button and volume buttons at the same time.  If the phone is still in continuous white screen bootloop when you wake up in the morning after recharging it, you'll need to set an hour aside to get it hooked up with google again, etc.

3.  If you have Google 2-step authentification (which I recommend, with an Android verify program which gives you a constantly re-generating second PIN or passcode), you will need to get on the internet from your PC and turn that off here.

The main reason I'm writing about this is because my phone problems tied me up for about 2 hours.  I lost a lot of downloaded apps and contact information that was stored on the phone.  I found a lot of frustrated people leaving messages online, which basically oriented around getting replacement phones, to a high degree.

And if I lived in Malaysia, or Chile, or Kenya, I have no doubt that I'd find someone on the street corner to fix the phone in 5 minutes, without losing any data.    Preserving $400 cell phones with savvy, it's something really good...

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