Buttons don't work (by 49 users)

Problem with Moto Razr where nothing works and either one of the following happens:
- voice record thing keeps popping up
- volume keeps moving
- none of the keys work except power off?

Here’s what’s going on:
The phone has these three silver buttons on either side of the flip. They internally have soldered connections, and those connections are getting triggered either due to water, or due to lint accumulated in your phone (yes that’s what happens when you keep it without cover in your pocket and bags). The lint and muck gets moist with humidity (rainy weather etc) and causes the same. It’s something like a ghost sitting somewhere continues to click a button. Why the power off works is because that is the only button that overrides all others.

I had the same problem and was able to fix it. It’s nota fluke, because post that I have fixed 2 more phones with similar problem, which were lying dead-unused with friends because the service center was asking for more than the phones weight for fixing it.

What to do:
Don’t try this at home until left with no other option, because opening the phone yourself is.. Anyway here goes:
Use same opening procedure as slotdoctor did in his post:
First things first –
1 - Take out the battery.
2 – Allow phone to dry. At least the water that entered it from the rain, tub, pot, or your baby’s saliva. If you don’t have access to sun, place it overnight next to the fan exhaust of your laptop and leave the virus scan or disk defrag on (to keep the fan running what else)

Get cracking it:
On the LCD side, you need to take the top apart. Take the 4 front tiny rubbers from the big LCD, one in each corner then you will need a special STAR screw driver, if you don’t have one, buy/beg/borrow/steal. Then you will need to use a blade of very thin flat screwdriver to insert in the thin area on the sides of the panel (where the silver buttons are located). I saw a YouTube demo of the same, don’t remember the link though, but you can find it. While you try and open it, think like opening an oyster if you have seen oneJ.

Clean it:
Once you succeed opening it, you will find that the three that is done, you will see that the back of your LCD, some connecting bus wires (and a lot of lint all over). Don’t touch anything. Use a clean soft makeup brush to get rid of all lint. While you do that, the silver buttons will fall off! That’s ok. Then you’ll find small electronic click buttons exposed where the silver buttons fell off from. Total 4 such buttons (the volume silver buttons has 2 electronic buttons underneath). Notice 4 soldered legs/terminals on each of these click buttons, and identify the terminal pair that has stuff between those terminals, most probably the one that was making the ghost clicks. Use a wooden toothpick to clean. No alcohol or water. Then blow away the scrapings (no spitting). You’ll be tempted to, but don’t go about poking the tooth-pick all over to try and clean every speck. And don’t even think about trying to clean all terminals. Just concentrate on the button that was giving ghost clicks.

Test!
Before you start re-assembling: test. Put back the battery, switch on, and hopefully the ghost clicks are gone.

Reassemble
If you remember what you took off, assemble back.

- UK