So recently I bought a Motorola G3 phone from my friend which is in an excellent condition.
After using it for around 2 weeks without facing any issues, I once forgot to charge it which obviously turned off the phone.
As any sane person would do, I plugged it to the power supply that evening assuming that it was charging.
Interestingly enough, even after leaving it for 2 hours to charge, the phone refused to turn on. It was bricked. No black screen, no white screen, nothing.
I used my friend's charger but no use. I plugged in to the computer through data cable but still the phone did not respond.
After googling a lot, I came to know that there is a bug in the bootloader which is supposed to safeguard the phone and its owner from accidental explosion (LiOn batteries tend to explode on 0% battery).
There is a mechanism which prevents the phone from charging when the battery is totally empty. So how does this help? It shows 0% when in fact, the battery is 3% and shuts down. This way, the battery never goes empty. But, this same module doesn't know if the battery is really 3% or 0% when we try to reboot it. That's when this problem occurs.
So how to tackle this?
The only way I found was to press and hold the power and volume down buttons to get a "fast boot" screen which will help me going one step ahead in resoling this problem.
I plugged the phone to A/C mains again. Then I tried holding the key combination for 6 seconds and there was no change. 20 seconds and nothing. 2 minutes, still a no no.
So I googled for a timer and set it to 6 minutes. Held the power + voldown buttons and closed my eyes. The timer started to beep. I woke up after this short nap and looked at my phone. There it was!
The fast boot screen!! Yes I was so happy that at least something came up.
I was shown with some menu options and pressed the volume down button until I "recovery mode" came up. I selected it thinking it will help according to more websites I googled.
It rebooted and displayed an error message "no module".
I just turned off the phone again holding just the power button for 6 seconds. Remember, I had the cable connected o power supply all the time. I turned it back on and voila! Battery charging at 0%!!
Without me doing anything further, it booted the OS and I started getting notifications of my apps.. :) :) I left it for 4 hours to adequately charge the battery.
That was my tryst with the android phone without a removable battery. Now you know what to do when the bootloader fails on your phone! :)
