Phone locked - emergency calls only. Try again in xxxxxx minutes!!

[Nick_1020]

Ran into a bit of an annoying problem with my daughter's phone today. We confiscated her phone last week as she was being a pain in the arse and as we were going for a family day out to the beach today, I thought it would be a good idea to let her have her phone back as she has been good for the past couple of days and no doubt she would enjoy taking photos of the rock pools etc. Anyway, when I gave the phone back to her we was having a bit of a laugh trying to guess her passcode. I made a few attempts and the phone was locked for a minute so I gave up and gave her the phone back. She waited a minute, put her passcode in and all was well. Happy daughter!

Then a little while later on the way to the beach she passed me her phone as it had a message telling her to try again in 650,000 minutes later of something ridiculous. We tried restarting it, removing the battery and sim card for a while and even done a soft reset but the only progress made was that the time to try again would come down to 66,620 minutes which is still bloody ridiculous. I even tried logging into windowsphone.com and used the find my phone -> lock feature to see if that would somehow help me to unlock but to no avail.

Anyway, I'm all out of ideas and would like to avoid performing a hard reset as I'm not entirely sure if she has her data backed up and I don't think she would be too impressed if she lost anything.

So ignoring which muppet at Nokia/Microsoft that thought it would be a good idea to place a lock restriction on Lumia phones that can prevent the phone being used for over 300 days, is there anything I can do to resolve this issue please?

The closest Nokia Care Point is an hour's drive away so that is certainly an option but would be quite inconvenient to get to. Also, if I had to take it to a Care Point, could they fix it without hard resetting the phone? If they can do it, would it be something a local (non-Nokia Care Point) mobile phone shop could fix with the right tools?

Finally, I've seen a suggestion to use NSU to reinstall the firmware. Is this the same as a hard reset and would any personal data be lost?

Thanks for any help.

 

[foxbat121]

Hard reset is your only choice. It is done so if you lost your phone, thieves won't be easily guess your passcode to steal the personal information out of it.

Google has introduced a way for your to reset the passcode via web after proper authentication for Android phones. Microsoft should copy Google on this. But I won't try to guess anyone's passcode for another reason: most phones that connect to a corporate exchange server have only a 10-try limit before it automatically hard reset the phone for you.

 

[Nick_1020]

Cheers foxbat121. That's a real shame. I appreciate why the restriction is placed but feel the length of time is incredibly excessive. It seemed to go from 1 minute to 300 odd days in no time.

So if I took the phone to a Care Point, the only thing they could do would be a hard reset?

 

[foxbat121]

Cheers foxbat121. That's a real shame. I appreciate why the restriction is placed but feel the length of time is incredibly excessive. It seemed to go from 1 minute to 300 odd days in no time.

IIRC, for every failed retry, the wait time doubles. But the worst you can do is power it off or take the battery out. This causes the phone lost the track of your last re-try and immediately go to maximum.

So if I took the phone to a Care Point, the only thing they could do would be a hard reset?

Correct. It is an OS feature, Nokia can't do much about it.

 

[Nick_1020]

Thanks again foxbat121.

Just done a hard reset. It looks like she had most things backed up to the cloud between MS and Google so it wasn't too drastic. App list and settings don't seem to have synced though.

 

[Chanukya Palukurthi]

Ran into a bit of an annoying problem with my daughter's phone today. We confiscated her phone last week as she was being a pain in the arse and as we were going for a family day out to the beach today, I thought it would be a good idea to let her have her phone back as she has been good for the past couple of days and no doubt she would enjoy taking photos of the rock pools etc. Anyway, when I gave the phone back to her we was having a bit of a laugh trying to guess her passcode. I made a few attempts and the phone was locked for a minute so I gave up and gave her the phone back. She waited a minute, put her passcode in and all was well. Happy daughter!

Then a little while later on the way to the beach she passed me her phone as it had a message telling her to try again in 650,000 minutes later of something ridiculous. We tried restarting it, removing the battery and sim card for a while and even done a soft reset but the only progress made was that the time to try again would come down to 66,620 minutes which is still bloody ridiculous. I even tried logging into windowsphone.com and used the find my phone -> lock feature to see if that would somehow help me to unlock but to no avail.

Anyway, I'm all out of ideas and would like to avoid performing a hard reset as I'm not entirely sure if she has her data backed up and I don't think she would be too impressed if she lost anything.

So ignoring which muppet at Nokia/Microsoft that thought it would be a good idea to place a lock restriction on Lumia phones that can prevent the phone being used for over 300 days, is there anything I can do to resolve this issue please?

The closest Nokia Care Point is an hour's drive away so that is certainly an option but would be quite inconvenient to get to. Also, if I had to take it to a Care Point, could they fix it without hard resetting the phone? If they can do it, would it be something a local (non-Nokia Care Point) mobile phone shop could fix with the right tools?