Folks,

I have a Lenovo Moto C Plus (I know, sh*tty phone, but I’m Brazilian and good ones are pretty expensive here) running stock ROM (7.0) and I use full disk encryption and unlock the phone with a pattern (not an PIN or a password).

This phone got stuck in a “Lenovo” logo in the “second boot” phase, after I enter my pattern to unlock the phone. I suspect there is no free disk space left in memory and it fails to boot because of that — Lenovo apps are not know for their quality and one of them may not check the remaining space before trying to write something, so it makes some sense. Apart from that, phone looks ok: I can use some features from the lock screen like emergency calls (but haven’t tried to actually complete a call to police, for obvious reasons), the screen shows the text message I configured and I can even take screenshots! (it was an accident, I have no idea why they left this feature there or where these files are saved when disk is encrypted).

I also wiped the caches from the recovery menu, but it didn’t changed anything.

So, before resorting to a factory reset (and lose all data I haven’t backed-up since December) I’ll try to enter the safe mode and see if it boots. When I long-click the “Power off” from the lock screen, it changes to the “Reboot to safe mode” confirmation screen — but it never shows the “Safe mode” text in the corner and I suppose it tries to boot normally. How can I put it in an actual safe mode?

TL;DR: How can I boot an Android that is encrypted and requesting my unlock pattern in safe mode?