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Help Phone restarts forgets all settings, passwords

D

Djordje Daskalovic

Lurker
Dear all,

I had a very strange thing happening with my phone two days ago. It was in my pocket, together with my other phone, battery was low. I pull the phone out of my pocket and it starts a walkthrough typical for the newly started device, asking for passwords, gmail info, asking for the finger print to be set up from scratch. Because it is my second phone, set up with a random gmail account, I of course lost memory of the account, passwords, everything and I logged in with another gmail account.

The problem is that the phone now is not showing all the apps that were installed and messages and stuff. It forgot everything, including my Samsung account. And of course I cannot remember all the passwords and stuff so I am losing contacts, messages and other stuff like this.

My question is how come this happened, having in mind my phone was locked in my pocket, and does someone else have similar experience? This thing with 100 users and passwords is pising me off.

Bests
 
Sounds like it has factory reset (I assume it's an old enough model that it doesn't have factory reset protection, or else you'd have no choice but to re-enter the original Google account).

It won't know your old contacts, apps etc because those were associated to the account you were using on that phone, not the different account you used this time. You need to remember what that account was and start again using that one. If you can't remember all of these accounts and passwords you need to store them somewhere safe: just having them set up in a phone and trusting it will never break/get lost/be stolen is a strategy that is going to fail you sooner or later.

As for what happened, I've never encountered myself but have read occasional reports of spontaneous resets, usually involving old phones and low power. Why it should happen is not clear: the storage is non-volatile so losing power won't wipe it. I suspect aging hardware is involved somewhere, but whatever the cause it is rare but this isn't the first such report I've seen.
 
Thanks for the info. It is kind of easier when I know I am not the only one who encountered this problem.

I guess I should start buying more expensive/reliable phones, like iPhone. I am sure these gadgets don't self reset to factory settings.

Much appreciated.
 
Djordje Daskalovic said:
Thanks for the info. It is kind of easier when I know I am not the only one who encountered this problem.

I guess I should start buying more expensive/reliable phones, like iPhone. I am sure these gadgets don't self reset to factory settings.

Much appreciated.
Click to expand...
i agree with everything save for the iphone part....lol. i have had my note 8 since the beginning and it runs amazingly well with really great battery life.
 
Actually I was so angry that I tried calling Samsun and Android (Google) but without success.

I will complain as soon as I have such an opportunity, but I doubt I will be tak2n seriously as I got the phone from my carrier instead of buying it from a store directly.
 
How old is it? If you bought it from your carrier they may be the right people to complain to.

As for reliability, remember what I said about rarity. I've seen a few people report something like this over the decade I've been a member here (not enough to be sure of a pattern, and of course only have partial information on the circumstances, i.e. what they wrote, so there may be other factors that differ from your case). I know nobody personally who has had this problem, and personally I typically use my phones for 4-5 years between upgrades (and even my 2010 HTC is still fine, if a bit slow and unable to use many recent apps). What I'm saying is that this is not remotely a common issue with android.
 
Actually, the phone is not that old. Less than two years. And it is not full with buggy apps. Besides the standard ones it had only Viber, Outlook, some banking software and Facebook installed.
 
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