Un-bricking a Nokia G10

Written August 11, 2022

Not-so-recently, a Nokia G10 phone that I brought with me on an international trip decided to spontaneously stop working. I suspect the fact that full device encryption was enabled made it more difficult to reset the device to factory.

On boot, the device would accept the most recent PIN I used, then attempt to load the home screen which would show a loading bar forever. I could access the Settings menu by swiping down from the top and using the quick access, but attempting to factory reset required a PIN, and the same one that was accepted on the login screen would be rejected. This leads me to believe that the device somehow got into a bad state, where the PIN used for device encryption somehow got decoupled from the lock screen PIN.

In order to fix this, I attempted to use all combinations of boot keys to no avail. It seems the only screen you can get into without a PC connection is fastboot. There is no obvious way to access a recovery menu to do a full disk wipe.

The solution I found was to use the fastboot utility on a PC. These can be installed on Arch Linux with the following:

The first step is to then reboot into standard fastboot on the phone:

Power off the phone through OS or by holding down the power button

Press and hold Volume Down & Power at the same time until the fastboot screen appears

Connect the phone via USB to the PC with fastboot installed

Then, run the following command to reboot the phone into the *new* fastboot mode:

Wait for the phone to boot, and issue the following command:

You should now be at a menu where you can factory reset / erase the device. Once this is done, reboot the device and wait for the setup flow to appear.

I would expect these instructions to work for other Nokia devices, such as Nokia G10, Nokia G20, etc.