"Bricked" gets used loosely to describe anything from a phone stuck on a boot animation to one that shows absolutely nothing on screen and isn't recognized by any cable. Those are very different situations with very different recovery paths, and figuring out which one you're actually dealing with is the first step before trying anything else.
A soft brick means the device is stuck — typically boot-looping on a logo, or stuck at a black screen with the backlight on — but at least one of these still works: the bootloader (fastboot mode), a custom recovery, or the stock recovery. This is by far the more common outcome of a failed ROM flash, a bad Magisk patch, or an interrupted OTA update.
How to check:
fastboot devices.fastboot reboot recovery).Recovery paths, roughly in order of how invasive they are:
A hard brick is more severe: the screen stays completely black with no backlight, there's no vibration on power button press, and the device isn't recognized by Windows, macOS, or Linux in any USB mode at all — not even as an unknown device. This typically happens when the bootloader itself gets corrupted or erased, most often from flashing the wrong partition, interrupting a bootloader-level flash mid-write, or a failed unlock/relock sequence gone wrong.
A true hard brick with genuinely zero USB response usually requires manufacturer service or, for a smaller number of chipsets, specialized low-level recovery hardware that isn't something most users have on hand. Before concluding you're in this situation, however, it's worth ruling out the far more common false alarm below.
Many phones that look hard-bricked are actually sitting in a low-level emergency download mode that produces no screen output and no vibration by design, which makes it indistinguishable from a true hard brick just by looking at it. Qualcomm-based phones drop into EDL mode (also called 9008 mode) under certain failure conditions, and MediaTek phones have an equivalent BROM/preloader mode. Both show a completely black, silent phone to the naked eye.
The only way to tell the difference is to check Device Manager (Windows) or lsusb (Linux/macOS) with the phone connected. If a new, unrecognized USB device appears — even without any picture on the phone's screen — the chipset's low-level recovery mode is very likely active, and the situation is recoverable using the chipset-specific driver and flashing tool rather than being a true hard brick.
Both paths require a complete, correctly matched firmware package for your specific model — a firmware package for a similar-sounding variant of the same phone can make things worse rather than better, since it may write partition layouts that don't match your device's actual hardware.