[Moto G 2015 General] qwertyiapine:
XT1541 boot loop?

Hello all at XDA, this is a very helpful community that I am hoping can provide some advice to enable my XT1541 8Gb 1Gb with locked bootloader to boot again.

I spent in excess of 12 hours on it yesterday meticulously reading every page of this thread, and the first seven of 100+ pages of the stock rom page trying and retrying the helpful suggestions offered to others with similar problems.

I will provide as many details of what I have tried as I can remember, but first the history, which is mostly unknown and may be the reason why nothing has worked.

I bought the phone from ebay, listed as being stuck in a boot loop after having a replacement screen fitted. Not much to work with, not even being clear as to whether or not the boot loop first appeared immediately after the replacement, or later on.

There were posts in this thread from somebody who said his phone looped after replacing the screen, but was never solved due to possibly damaging the ribbon afterwards.

The screen on mine is likely to be one of these compatible screens, rather than oem and wonder if this may be part of the problem? drivers?

When I received the phone, the first thing I did was connect it to a wall charger. The screen lit up to the Motorola splash screen (non animated), then briefly showed an empty battery icon before the screen going blank, followed by the same boot screen, over and over.

I thought that perhaps there was not enough power to boot the OS (like the issue previous Moto G's had) so left it for a while to try and charge. I swapped the charger over for a 2A to provide as much power as I could but nothing changed apart from the dead battery icon no longer showing before the next loop. It was unclear though if the screen constantly lighting up was draining out any useful charge being put in thus never being able to complete the boot like previous models suffered with.

I then held down VOL- and the phone entered fastboot. I connected to phone to a usb port on my pc, information showed that usb was connected, battery went from red low (charging) to green ok (charging) so I again left it to try and charge the battery even though the screen was lit.

I then tried the different options available. Start, Recovery, Factory etc. All of these options resulted in the splash screen looping. No red exclamation mark when trying to enter recovery. The only option that works is barcode.

Running Ubuntu

lsusb

showed the Motorola was connected, so I confirmed with

sudo fastboot devices

which showed the serial number of the phone.

I again tried to select recovery which failed.

Searching for stock firmware brought me to Moto G (3rd Gen) Factory Firmware Images, and to this guide linked at the top of it.

I did some reading to select which firmware to download, not knowing what was installed already, and the associated problems of attempting to downgrade, so I chose the only 6.0.1 1GB image available which would hopefully be a match, or an upgrade.

I immediately had a problem because the first step was to perform a factory reset which I could only attempt by

sudo fastboot erase cache

and

sudo fasboot erase userdata

which reading suggests does not work, and a reset should either be performed from within Android, or via recovery. Neither of which I have access to so all I can do is try.

I downloaded and flashed XT1541_OSPREY_RETEU_6.0.1_MPI24.107-55_cid7 performing each command one line at a time, and flashed all 7 sparsechunks.

Everything reported ok with no errors using all the commands listed in the how to.

Result was the same boot loop. I tried two more times, no errors, but still looping.

I read suggestions to try 6.0, or 5.1..1, the exact details and order are now unclear but there were different errors at each attempt, so after each failure I would reflash 6.0.1, try it, and then another firmware, or suggestion as I came to them in this thread.

However further into the thread, but not mentioned earlier on whilst attempting to downgrade I read that I should not attempt to flash the bootloader, but too late as I had already followed instructions that omitted that line. Also do not try and flash gpt.bin which was another error I had, so I would try again armed with the new information which would fail, followed by me reflashing 6.0.1 again.

I read that unlocking the bootloader helps, so I got the unlock code from Motorola but could not unlock the bootloader as I cannot check the enable oem unlock box in developer options.

Various attempts to try various commands all failed due to the locked bootloader, I cannot think now, but just about everything in these previous pages.

Cannot load TWRP instead of installing, flashing stock recovery, then rebooting into recovery all fail.

Next I reboot into Win7 and try everything again using mfastboot instead of fastboot. I also installed RSDlite 6.2.4 and tried even more images.

Nothing has worked.

By this time the phone has been connected via usb for hours so I presume that the battery now has sufficient power to boot, but cannot know for certain.

My other concern is this screen, could it be the culprit?

I know I have not listed everything that I have tried because now it is all a blur, but I would appreciate any help that anybody has to offer.

Not knowing the full history could mean that somebody has bricked it beyond rescue but there may be things still to try?

If anybody can do this, it will be somebody from here.

I shall wait impatiently and hope for any further tips to try. Thanks in advance......