LG Optimus L3 stuck in a boot loop

[AC Question]

I have an LG Optimus L3 MS659 from MetroPCS that I love, and it's bricked. At dinner last night the phone turned itself off and when I got it started again it was in the bootup tutorial - asking me to sync to my google account, set up voicemail, just like it had when I bought it. The setup ran really slowly too, menu buttons onscreen would take several seconds to react after I had pressed them. When I got through setup all of my apps had disappeared and the phone was reset to how it had been when I bought it, and was still acting slow. I restarted it and after a long boot up I ended up back in the setup menu, and the phone was moving even slower. I reset the phone by holding Volume down/home/power for eight seconds and then confirmed a reset - after the reset, the phone is stuck in a loop of the startup animations and won't go anywhere.

How can I get my phone back?!?! I'd appreciate any advice you guys can give me.

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! It sounds like you actually have the Optimus F3, since that's the one with the MS659 model number. A few things to try:

1. Battery failure can sometimes cause weird behavior like this. Take it out, lay it flat on a table, and try to spin it. If it spins freely, it's bulging in the middle, which means it's going bad. Try a new one.

2. Corrupt external SD cards can cause problems as well. If you have one in the phone, unmount it (in Settings>Storage), remove it, then reboot, and see what happens.

3. Try booting into Safe Mode, which disables all 3rd party apps. If the problems persist, that means there's an issue with either the hardware or the system software. If the problems go away, then there's something that you installed that's the culprit.