How To Fix A Galaxy S3 Won’t Turn On [Troubleshooting Guide]

We receive hundreds of emails each week from our readers reporting–many actually complain–about the problems they encountered with their phone. In one of the emails, our reader, a Samsung Galaxy S3 owner, said his phone was fully-charged but about an hour later, he found it turned off. The worst part is, he couldn’t power it on.

What happened? Well, even Samsung engineers couldn’t answer that question without performing some troubleshooting procedures.

In this post, we will attempt to troubleshoot the phone exhausting all possible ways to bring it back to life.

How To Fix A Galaxy S3 Won’t Turn On

Step 1: Hit the Power button

Yes, please do. This is the first thing you should do when troubleshooting a problem like this. Don’t just do it once or twice but do it many times just to make sure that there is indeed a problem with the powering on of the phone.

Step 2: Remove the battery and hold the Power button

Yes, I’m serious. Actually, somebody told me I was a fool when he saw me pull the battery out of his phone and hit the power button. He said, there is no way I can turn the phone on without the battery. That’s true, but we’re not actually trying to power on the phone at this point. Rather, we’re trying to drain electricity stored in electronic components inside the phone. After this, place the battery back and hit the power button again. If the phone stays dead after that, proceed to the next step.

Step 3: Boot to Safe Mode

To rule out the possibility of a third-party application preventing the phone from booting up normally, you need to boot it to Safe Mode. It will run on pre-loaded apps and nothing else. So, if it were an app causing the problem, you would know by doing this.

1. Press and hold the Power button.
2. Immediately after the Samsung Galaxy S3 screen appears, release the Power button then press and hold the Volume Down key.
3. The phone would restart and the Safe Mode text will be visible in the lower-left corner of the screen.

Consider yourself lucky if you can go this far. If this is the case, then you can commence the search for the rogue app and uninstall it. Start your search from the most recent installation. The rule of thumb is to disable suspected apps first and attempt to boot normally. The problem has already been fixed at this point.

In case you cannot boot to Safe Mode, proceed with the next step.

Step 4: Boot to Recovery Mode and wipe cache partition

Booting to Recovery Mode can be already be considered a desperate measure yet it is not a guarantee you can fix the problem. In fact, there is no guarantee you can even boot to this mode. But try to follow these steps:

1. Press and hold the Volume Up, Home, and Power buttons.
2. When the phone vibrates, release the Power button but continue holding the other two until Android System Recovery screen appears.
3. Use the Volume Down button to highlight ‘wipe cache partition’ and press the Power button to select it.
4. The phone will reboot automatically after the cache partition was wiped out.

At this point, if you can’t boot to Recovery Mode no matter how much you tried, then we have already narrowed down the problem. It’s either your battery is totally busted or your phone’s Power switch has a problem.

Step 5: Try a different or new battery

Borrow from a friend or just buy a new battery so you can test if it was really the battery that caused the problem. If you bought a new one and you found out it wasn’t the battery, at least, you now have a spare. Of course, make sure the battery is compatible with the Galaxy S3 and make it a point to fully-charge before using it. If your phone powers on after a battery swap, then problem solved.

Step 6: Seek help from a technician

In case you’ve tried a different battery and the phone still refuses to turn on, it’s time you brought it back to the store or to a shop where it can be physically check thoroughly. If proven defective by a technician, a replacement unit may be provided for you of it could be repaired. I have a suspicion it’s a Power switch issue especially if the phone don’t respond when you pressed it.
I hope this helps.