Last Updated on April 6, 2017 by Mathew Diekhake

As the age-old smartphone story goes, everything that brings happiness always comes with some risks. Those same risks usually involve people potentially losing control of their devices after installing a custom ROM, applying root access, a custom recovery or custom firmware. We call this “bricking” a device in the industry. More specifically, you can end up soft-bricking or hard-bricking your device, with the latter being an experience hopefully nobody you know encounters. Mobile devices are expensive, and as such, people cannot afford to keep replacing them if the make mistakes. That forced the hand of the third-party developers who love customizing devices to come up with some solutions so people can easily recovery from bricking their smartphones and tablets.

So, if you are one of the unlucky people who didn’t follow the correct procedure for unlocking your device from the default factory restrictions, or things simply didn’t work out for you, you need to apply the following and bring your Droid Turbo back to life. The guide itself is simple and most of the pre-requisites are very similar to the ones you would take if you were following any other of our guides.

Droid Turbo

We are listing some of the essentials you should follow before starting the steps. That way you know what you need before getting down to business, the risks involved and anything else you may want to understand.

  • Backup the data and the OS by using one of the popular third-party application available from Google Play such as the helium app, G Cloud backup or Easy backup. Make copies of the settings, videos, pictures, passwords, market applications and any other sensitive data you don’t want to lose such as the phone contacts.
  • Use the built-in backup utility for making copies of the data if you don’t want to download and install one of the apps from Google Play. There’s many ways to back up the data and none of them are incorrect. It comes down to your preference.
  • You are connecting to a computer during the guide. That means you want to turn the Turbo on, navigate to the Settings, followed by Developer Options. Now look inside for a box next to the words “USB Debugging.” Tick the box to enable the mode.
  • The USB Debugging feature isn’t much good without the up to date USB drivers to go along with it. Therefore, you want to visit the official website and download the drivers or install them from third-party links if you don’t have them already.
  • Be careful that your third-party links are coming from trusted sources where you can see it’s popular to download. Many bad people install adware and other nasty infections inside the files that are not trustworthy. These act as horrible bloatware on your computer and slow down your machine. Make sure you trust the third-party link if you decide to use one.
  • Most people have the latest drivers already working on their computers for the smartphone. You can check to see if yours are working by connecting the phone and trying to get access to the phones pictures from the computer drive. If you are opening up the pictures, you know the drivers are working.
  • The USB charging feature should take care of most smartphones while plugging into the PC. If yours isn’t working you should make sure you have 50% battery power as a minimum.

How to Unbrick Motorola Droid Turbo

  1. Install Android SDK on your Windows-based computer. Learn how it’s done here: How To Install Android SDK And ADB On Windows With Three Different Methods.
  2. Download the official stock and signed firmware for the Droid Turbo from here.
  3. Download RSD Lite from here. The link takes you to the flashing tool.
  4. Follow the prompts for successfully installing the RSD Lite package on the Windows computer.
  5. Start with the Turbo off by selecting the Power > Off button.
  6. Boot the same device back up in fastboot mode.
  7. Connect the phone to the computer using the USB wire you use for phone charging.
  8. Open up the RSD Lite package on the desktop and select the button with three dots.
  9. Upload the stock and signed official firmware file.
  10. Select the ‘start’ button and wait for the flashing to finish.
  11. Disconnect the phone from the PC safely by stopping the USB Mass Storage device as you usually would.

The Motorola Droid Turbo will now be working again like it was out of the box running official stock software updates and without any kind of root access. If you want to take your chances again you can gain root access again any time by following another guide. Otherwise you might want to check out How to remove unwanted bloatware on the same mobile.