MS Lumia 640 (Windows 10) won't boot up, soft reset doesn't work

Hello Nick,

You can try to recover your data if you have them stored on your phone's extended storage device. You can use a memory card reader for the extended storage device to move your data such as music, photos, and documents to a computer.

If your phone was connected to the Internet before the issue occurred, your contacts should be synced to your Microsoft account. Signing in again with the same account will sync your contacts back to the phone.

You can also restore a back up of your phone during the phone set up after a hard reset if you have created one.

Since your phone is boot-looping, the only resolution is to perform a hard reset or to use the Windows Device Recovery Tool.

To hard reset your phone in its current state, please do the following:

1. Press and hold the Volume down and Power buttons at the same time until you feel a vibration (about 10 to 15 seconds).
2. Release the buttons after feeling the vibration, and then immediately press and hold the Volume down button until you see a large exclamation mark.
3. Once the exclamation mark appears, press the following four buttons in this order: Volume up, Volume down, Power, Volume down. Your phone should now reset and restart itself.

If the hard reset key combination is ineffective or is not working, please use the Windows Device Recovery Tool to restore your phone.

Note: Restoring your phone using the mentioned tool will revert it back to its factory settings. You may have to use the Upgrade Advisor app again to update your phone to the Windows 10 Mobile operating system.

Feel free to reply if you have further questions.

thanks it really worked

Hello Nick,

Resetting the phone will remove all the data including your apps, text messages, notes, phone settings. Contacts and calendar are sync with the Microsoft account on the phone. The only way to backup or copy these files into another device is the phone should be working properly. If you have access with the Microsoft account currently logged in with the phone, you may view your contacts by signing in here.

Let us know if you need further assistance.

Thanks Joe.

The only good news here is that yes I had my phone set to store all photos on the SD card, so those are not at risk.

However as the phone was passed on to me by a friend some years ago, and as it proved problematic to get his Outlook account off the phone (can only be done by factory reset which I didn't realise for some time), I've never been able to hook it up to my own Outlook account, and it wasn't still connected to his, so all the things that would otherwise sync in the cloud haven't done so - and I couldn't find a way to back it up otherwise.

The phone might recover its functioning if I do a hard reset, but (please correct me if I'm wrong) that will definitely wipe all the data on it including contacts, text messages, notes, calendar etc

So here's the key question... can a specialist of some kind plug into the phone in some way (given that it won't presently boot up) as to be able to download/extract that type of info (contacts and text messages especially)?

If so what kind of specialist would that be and where would I find one (in  the UK)?

And would I then need a functioning Lumia in order to access the data extracted, or would it be in some generic format that could be read by some other piece of hardware such as a laptop?

Thanks for your help. Hopefully there are others interested in the cracking this problem.

Nick