i ran into an issue while installing iodéOS on my Fairphone 5.
I had to manually flash it since the current installer won’t work with the Fairphone 5 right now.
Wasn’t my first manual install of another OS on a phone and it seemed to install just fine.
After the install was done i was prompted if i wanted to lock the bootloader which i did.
After the following reboot i got an error message, something about my device being unsafe, not entirely sure about the exact message since it showed only briefly and i am now stuck with a device that will only boot into the fastboot menu.
I tried getting into the recovery mode to maybe factory reset my device, but no matter what i try the screen only goes blank shows the fairphone logo and i get thrown back into the fastboot menu.
I already tried unlocking the bootloader again with “fastboot flashing unlock” which only results in the message:
FAILED (remote: ‘Flashing Unlock is not allowed’)
fastboot: error: Command failed
I tried ”fastboot oem allow-flashing” as well, apparently someone was able to flash a Fairphone 5 despite having a locked bootloader ~a year ago after entering the command, but no luck for me.
Fastboot in general is working fine, for example the “fastboot reboot” command works, when trying “fastboot continue“ i get the message:
Resuming boot FAILED (remote: ‘Failed to load image from partition: Load Error’)
fastboot: error: Command failed
Other fastboot commands i tried were flashing unlock_critical which returns “Device already: unlocked!” or get_unlock_ability which returns 0 which indicates unlocking not being allowed.
If anyone has another idea what i might try feel free to comment.
The get_unlock_ability returning 0 seems strange as you had recently unlocked it correct so it would have had to be allowed? There has been some confusion in the past months with some Fairphone users that effectively ended up with bricked devices because of what I thought was related to first reinstalling FPOS (and not locking (??) at the end but it may possibly have set get_unlock_ability to 0 even though the device remained unlocked?), then ending up like you: they relocked at the end of the iodéOS install and couldn’t unlock again.
The iodéOS install does not change get_unlock_ability to 0, so if it reports that it must have been like that before iodéOS install, but then I still can’t sort out what led to what in that case.
I think an important note for our installation process may be to make sure that users manually confirm Allow OEM Unlocking is enabled from Developer Options before they install, just to make sure.
There is a FP6 post in the past day as well that may be in a similar situation. In addition, upgrades to v7.2 beta for a FP6 user with a locked bootloader left it unbootable, it then reverted to the prior v7.1 install so that beta was discarded. This last one matches issues we have seen for FP4 users upgrading to v7.x: if the bootloader is locked then it refuses to boot. This also is not solved.
So there are getting to be a growing number of issues with FP + locked bootloaders. Some on new installs, some after upgrading. I will pass a reference to this post the developers.
The reinstalling FPOS bit seems interesting.
As a fact i did that before i installed iodéOS.
Let me just quickly write the whole story of this FP5 down:
After the phone arrived (refurbished Model with FPOS preinstalled from the official Store), i unlocked the bootloader with the official way FP describes.
After that i had a journey with postmarketOS which seemed like an interesting concept to me so i tried it a few days with this phone.
I reinstalled FPOS i think once in that process due to me making an error in the postmarketOS install, never locked the bootloader and everything was fine.
Then i went on to install iodéOS, i think i reinstalled FPOS before going for the iodéOS install so the partitions would be normal and not weird from all of my postmarketOS testing.
I am fairly confident that i checked the developer options before installing iodéOS and that Allow OEM Unlocking was still enabled. I might had to enable usb debugging, but that should have been it, i think.
And yeah, then i tried the installer, which did nothing thanks to the FP5 not being recognized by it and tried the manual install which led me to the current state.
You mentioned the device switching from A to B slot after 5-6 failed boot attempts in the FP6 post you linked.
Well i am definitely past 5-6 failed attempts so the automatic switch won’t seem to happen.
As a fact i remember trying to manually switch the slot with a fastboot command. Let me check it again.
Should have been “fastboot --slot b --set-active”
which right now returned:
Setting current slot to ‘b’ FAILED (remote: 'Slot Change is not allowed in Lock State ')
fastboot: error: Command failed
Are you sure you didn’t leave it unlocked when putting on FPOS since you knew you were then going to immediately reinstall iodéOS? I do suspect it was unlocked and maybe developer options weren’t even re-enabled (thus Allow OEM Unlocking was not enabled as I suspect it is turned off by default when flashing FPOS?)?
Meaning, if after FPOS install you went directly back to the bootloader and flashed iodéOS from fastboot (relocking the bootloader at the end) it can at least describe how it ended up in this state: device locked, not booting, not unlockable again.
This really is a bad state, but if it is locked and unlockable and won’t boot I don’t know if we can do anything on our side
I am mostly certain.
So i said i flashed postmarketOS on it twice.
In between i flashed it back to FPOS and i definitely checked the developer options before flashing postmarket on there a second time, i am fairly certain i only had to enable usb debugging and everything else was set.
For the same reason i think i had to check FPOS before flashing iodéOS.
But all of that was some time last week or maybe the weekend before, so i could obviously misremember something as well.
Yeah i wasn’t expecting anything out of asking.
After all i tested quite a bit before writing this post.
I opened a service request with Fairphone as well, but they haven’t responded yet so i thought something might come up this way.
Either way i definitely wanted to share some info about what happened to my device and hopefully prevent this issue for someone in the future, as well as my solution, which at this point seems to be: Hopefully send it to fairphone for them to unbrick.
Either way thanks for trying to help me, i really appreciate that!
Again very sorry you are in this state. I know the iodé developers are working hard on the issue of our builds not booting (without a factory reset) when the device is locked.
On this note, if you can try to do a factory reset from Recovery maybe it would then boot iodéOS? If you can get iodéOS to boot you can of course then enable “Allow OEM Unlocking” again in Developer Options. I am not sure if it will work, but maybe?
Thats sadly not a thing i can do.
No matter what option i select in the fastboot menu, i always end up back in the fastboot menu.
”Start”, “Restart bootloader” and “Recovery mode” always do the same:
The display just shortly goes blank, i get the fairphone logo screen and end up back in fastboot.
The only option that does something else is “Power off” which well powers off the device.
Just tried “fastboot erase userdata”, not allowed.
This is the exact output:
******** Did you mean to fastboot format this f2fs partition?
Erasing ‘userdata’ FAILED (remote: ‘Erase is not allowed in Lock State’)
fastboot: error: Command failed
I still don’t know how “Allow OEM Unlocking” got disabled, but I think it had to be when you reinstalled FPOS. Regardless, as that seems to have been disabled one way or anther before installing iodéOS (even if the device wasn’t locked), then when installing iodéOS, locking and then hitting a “won’t boot” issue it is now a brick You will need to see if it can be reset by Fairphone.
So here we are again.
I just got my unbricked Fairphone 5 back yesterday and wanted to give this another shot.
So installed iodeOS 7.3 on the Fairphone yesterday and that worked great.
But i didn’t lock the bootloader, yet.
Instead i just booted into the OS first and made sure both “OEM unlocking” and “USB debugging” are checked before trying anything.
I think i read yesterday something about checking get_unlock_ability in fastboot mode as well before trying anything.
Might be me being a bit paranoid, but i don’t want to mess this up again, especially since this whole support ordeal took quite some time.
I read in this post Booloader relock limbo on Fairphone 5 - #17 by rik
about both needing to lock_critical as well as locking the bootloader, anything else i should be aware of?
Also i am not sure about the security patch level, my settings say i have a vendor security patch level of 5 February 2026 and an Android security update with date 1 February 2026, so should i wait for the next version of iodeOS before locking again?
The question is what FPOS version was on it before you installed iodéOS? I think v7.4 should be released in the next week, you could wait for that to be “double sure”. So install v7.4 then lock (but again, after you relock the bootloader all userdata will be, by design, wiped out).
Yep all working great on my side! (if we don’t take the audio recording issue into account, that’s another case).
I actually first locked just the bootloader with flashing lock, but then realized that I wanted to lock_critical too. So I unlocked again and ended up having to unlock_critical too, despite not having locked it. I didn’t know this, but apparently flashing lock automatically locks the critical partitions too?
Anyways, I didn’t notice any issues this time around, now that the iodeOS security patch was clearly newer than on FPOS previously. And I guess some things were fixed on the installation as well, thanks for that!
I am on the same boat, it has been almost two months since I opened a ticket with Fairphone Support to unbrick mine but no response as of yet. How long did it take you to get yours unbricked? Did you end up using the installer or CLI to flash iodeOS on to your device?
First of all thanks for the responses!
I think i will take your advice @rik and wait for 7.4 to be double sure.
I am currently using another phone myself and wanted to give this one to a family member after installing iode.
They can surely wait especially if the new version will release shortly.
I think i will follow the guide and lock_critical first, thanks!
Just checked my Mails.
I opened the ticket on january 16th and got the first response on february 20th.
Then a few days of back and forth mails regarding my problem and myself being willing to pay for the repair since it is not part of the warranty later i got the shipping label on the 26th.
At the repair center they had to examine my Phone first and then i got to the most fun part (at least for me) regarding this whole ordeal.
I had to go to the website for the repair center to accept the repair fee and pay for it.
Whats so bad about this?
Well i was only able to pay via credit card, which i didn’t own then.
So long story short i had to get one of those before i could pay, which took a while.
But after the payment they immediately unbricked my device and shipped it literally the next day.
To summarize this whole journey took from january 16th to march 26th.
But yeah they seem to have some problems with support tickets right now.
I just talked about this with a colleague yesterday and apparently he is waiting for a support ticket response as well, i think he had some issues with the fairphone forums invite mail or something like that.
Regarding the installation method, i installed iode a couple times so far, on my main device i used the installer, but sadly for my fairphone that didn’t work so i used the manual method which is described on the gitlab ota / ota · GitLab.
Yeah this is how I assumed it to work. Probably safest to follow these official instructions, even though I’m not fully convinced by FP due to similar experiences with their customer service.
key.