What's wrong with my looping phone?

[smokieUK]

It happens to be a Moto G9 Power, just over two years old, but it could be any phone... It's been very well looked after, not dropped, wetted, or damaged in any way. Battery life has always been fine.

It was in use (messaging) with at least 60% battery and it just shut down.

When you try to reboot it comes up with the splash screen then restarts.

I let the battery run right down to 0% as that used to help on some old device I had. But it won't charge. You see the 0% charged screen, but no charge light comes on and it doesn't charge.

It won't boot even on mains charger.

Someone on another forum kindly helped me re-image the phone, which seemed to go OK but made no difference.

So we've concluded it has a hardware problem - but what?

I've replaced the bit you plug the charger into.

Is it likely to be the battery itself? Or something else?

 

[mikedt]

Could be the battery, or maybe the main logic board is kaput?

 

[AugieTN]

Could be the battery, or maybe the main logic board is kaput?

^^^^^ What mikedt said. I can find that phone stateside for about $199 https://www.amazon.com/Snapdragon-U...lpcontext&ref_=fplfs&smid=A2QPEZGAXKI4ZK&th=1 I would simply dump that phone and get a new phone.

 

[ocnbrze]

well if you flashed a firmware update and the issue is still there, then yes we can assume that it is a hardware issue. does it matter what hardware issue it is? do you plan on fixing it yourself? i would not recommend getting it repaired. it will probably cost more than the phone is worth. i am with @AugieTN .......just get a new phone.

 

[svim]

Just going by your description on what happened, a very offhand guess would be the internal storage media chip failed, triggering a boot loop and then eventually a complete failure.
When a smartphone gets stuck in a boot loop, the most common problem is the installed Android operating system can no longer be loaded into RAM when the phone is starting up. That Android OS resides on the internal storage so a software-based boot loop is due to something corrupted the OS enough that it can't be read from the internal storage, and a hardware-based boot loop would be due to something like the internal storage chip failing, or some other vital component on the logic board itself failing. In that case, the Android OS can't be accessed at all. The boot loop is just the phone trying to start up, but it can't access the OS so it just gets stuck in its boot up process.
A software-based boot loop is more common, with a hardware component failing not so common. But it can happen. But you it doesn't seem like you have a lot of options in this situation. You might want to take your phone to a trusted phone repair shop to have them look it over, but be sure to get estimates on pricing. It might not be worth spending money on this phone and you might want to look into buying a new one instead.

Regarding discharging the battery to 0%, that's typically a very bad practice with any smartphone battery. That might have been something to try with a Ni-Cad battery 15 years ago but battery technology and development with Ni-Cads has changed quite a bit since that time, so stop doing that.
For a smartphone, manually discharging it to 0% likely killed the battery. A typical Li-ion smartphone battery requires at least a 5% minimum charge to stay functional. For some better insight and factual info on this:

BU-802c: How Low can a Battery be Discharged?

BU meta description needed...

batteryuniversity.com