Galaxy S2 Boot Issues – How to Force your Phone to Start

Today I encountered boot issues with a Samsung Galaxy S2 device. The phone has never experienced problems of this sort in the past so its refusal to start today was a surprise.

Before I go into details about how I fixed things, I’ll give some background information on what happened.

Background symptoms

The Galaxy S2 was running on very little charge so I decided to put it in the charger as usual to re-energize it. As soon as I had plugged it into the charger the device showed the standard picture full screen picture of the empty battery charging. At this point I didn’t think that anything outside of the normal was happening, since this is standard behavior for the Galaxy line of phones.

The problem happened when I decided to start the phone again. I had left it charging for about 20 minutes so I pressed the start button to boot it up. Rather than booting, however, I got no reaction from the device, and I was left staring at a black screen wondering what had happened.

The Solution

I tried various methods of getting the Galaxy S2 to start again including trying different chargers in case the one i had been using was faulty and the phone was completely out of charge. The different chargers did not help though, and neither did my pressing the start button repeatedly.

After reading about this online, it seems it can happen due to any number of reasons. Some have encountered it if they have installed applications from outside of the Google Play market, but in my case it was completely random and not due to any action on my part.

What did end up working was pressing a key combination. When I pressed the power up button by itself the phone would not respond. However the phone did start up again when I pressed the volume button in the position to increase the volume in combination with pressing the power button and held both buttons down for 10 seconds.

Somehow the combination of pressing the volume up and power buttons for ten seconds made the phone start up again.

I had seen advice by others in my Google searches advising removing the battery for 30 seconds and then re-inserting the battery and going through a button combination of pressing volume-up + the home button + the power button for ten seconds. I did not have to go through the process of physically removing the battery which was good.

I hope this helps anyone having similar booting-up problems with a Galaxy S phone. Feel free to leave a comment below if this article was helpful!