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How to unfreeze a frozen Samsung Galaxy S8 (easy steps)

ByGrace

Your Samsung Galaxy S8 has really impressive hardware specs and stable operating system (Android 7 Nougat which is soon to be upgraded to Oreo) but there are times when the system actually crashes. When it happens you may either have a phone with a black screen of death or just a frozen screen.

Both of these issues have similar symptoms and leave your phone unresponsive that whatever you do, there’s no difference. In the case of a frozen screen, it may occur while you’re using an app, listening to music or streaming videos. You may notice the phone would become so slow and lags before the display gets frozen on a certain screen.

But as long as the phone hasn’t been dropped on a hard surface, this problem can be fixed and I will share with you the solution that we’ve always been using to fix similar issues in the past. So, if you’re one of the owners of this phone and are currently dealing with a frozen screen, continue reading as this article may help you one way or another.

Before going further, if you found this post because you were trying to find a solution to your problem, then try to visit our Galaxy S8 troubleshooting page as we’ve already addressed most of the commonly reported issues with the phone. We’ve already provided solutions to some of the problems reported by our readers so try to find issues that are similar with yours and use the solutions we suggested. If they don’t work for you and if you need further assistance, fill up our Android issues questionnaire and hit submit.

What to do about a frozen Galaxy S8

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There’s only a couple of things you can do to make your Samsung Galaxy S8 that will make it respond again. However, there’s no guarantee the problem won’t occur in the future but at least,  you already know what to do. With that being said, here’s what you should do about it…

  • Press and hold the Volume Down button and the Power key at the same time for 10 seconds or until the phone reboots.

This procedure is what we refer to as Forced Reboot. You can rest assured your phone will respond to it because it is hard-wired to perform this procedure if the combination is done correctly. If you are familiar with the battery pull, then this is the equivalent of that. It refreshes your phone’s memory, closes all apps running in the background and reloads all services and core functions.

Try doing the same procedure a few times if the phone doesn’t respond to the first attempt. You may also try the following in case your phone remains unresponsive after a few attempts…

  1. Press and hold the Volume Down button and don’t let go of it.
  2. Press and hold the Power key while holding down the Volume Down button.
  3. Keep both keys held down for 10 seconds.

It basically has the same effect as the first procedure only that you press and hold the Volume Down button first before triggering the phone to power up by pressing the Power button. Bear in mind that if the Power key is pressed first, the phone would immediately react to it because it’s hard-wired to do so. When that happens, the Volume Down and Power combo will never be done correctly so the phone may not turn on since pressing and holding the Power key couldn’t do something about a firmware crash.

If the second procedure also fails to make your phone respond, then there’s a chance the battery got drained and just before the power ran out, the system may have crashed. Imagine having a system crash and a drained battery together. To address such possibility, here’s what you should do:

  1. Plug the charger to a working wall outlet.
  2. Connect the phone to its charger using the original cable.
  3. Allow the phone to charge for a few minutes regardless whether the charging symbol shows or not.
  4. After which, press and hold the Volume Down button and the Power key together for 10 seconds but this time while the phone is connected to its charger.

If the phone is still not responding after this, try running it up in Recovery mode to see if it’s capable of that and if it actually boots up in such mode, try doing the master reset:

  1. Press and hold the Volume Up key and the Bixby key, then press and hold the Power key.
  2. When the green Android logo displays, release all keys (‘Installing system update’ will show for about 30 – 60 seconds before showing the Android system recovery menu options).
  3. Press the Volume down key several times to highlight “wipe data / factory reset.
  4. Press Power button to select.
  5. Press the Volume down key until ‘Yes — delete all user data’ is highlighted.
  6. Press Power button to select and start the master reset.
  7. When the master reset is complete, “Reboot system now” is highlighted.
  8. Press the Power key to restart the device.

Regardless whether you were able to reset the phone or not, I suggest bringing it to the tech because a serious problem might be causing all this.

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