iPhone 11 stuck on 3 minute bootloop in 'Attempting to Recover Data'

Hi Jason,

Yeah, too bad about the recovery mode thing; that's definitely complicated the situation.

Generally the sensors that most commonly cause boot loops are from one of three sources.

1. The lightning port flex cable assembly
   iPhone 11 Lightning Connector Assembly Replacement - iFixit Repair Guide
2. The power button / flash / microphone flex assembly
   Manuales / Apple iPhone 11 / Power button, flash and top microphone
3. The battery
   iPhone 11 Battery Replacement - iFixit Repair Guide

Unfortunately without being able to access the panic logs, we're down to guessing. You mentioned that it appears liquid exposure seems to have been the cause; can we pin that down more specifically? Did the water get into the charging port? If so, that would be the best bet to replace first. If it was more in the top of the phone the power button flex might be a consideration, but that would assume there was a way for the water to get in such as a cracked screen or broken camera lens.

In the absence of any further information, my suggestion would be to try replacing those three parts in that order. And no, don't worry about aftermarket parts supporting the temperature sensor; any properly designed port has to support it or it's not going to work correctly. I have bought one port that turned out to be defective, but that was by far the exception; all the other charging port assemblies I've installed have worked fine despite being inexpensive aftermarket parts.

Oh, and yes, the haptics failing would tend to point to the lightning port flex since it gets its signals through and is mounted on the flex.

Yes, restoring your phone won't fix a hardware boot loop and will lose you all your data, so don't bother.

As far as your testing, unfortunately disconnecting the charging port will still cause a boot loop since it won't be able to communicate with the charging port sensors when it's unplugged, which gives exactly the same effect as a failed sensor so you can't really diagnose it by unplugging things.

Depending how your budget goes, you could always just buy all three parts so you only have to open the phone once rather than having to wait to order the next part if the previous one didn't fix the problem. And yes, as a last result you could, for instance, buy an iCloud locked phone and swap in your logic board. With the parts pairing strategy Apple has embarked on, you would need to bring over the screen and battery as well in order for everything to work as intended. As an alternative you could just put in the logic board long enough to pull the panic log; that would give you the information you need to fix the original phone, but it seems like that's going to be a more expensive way to fix it than just buying those three parts.

Hopefully I've given you enough to think about and point you in the right direction toward getting your phone fixed. Keep us updated on your progress and let us know how it turns out!