Why is my phone stuck with a visual of spinning gears?

One way to fix this issue is to fully charge the phone then try to soft reset it (press and hold the Power and Volume Down keys simultaneously for 15 seconds).

Another way is to use hard reset and return the phone to factory default without going to Settings.

The steps to reset your phone using hard reset are listed below:

Step 1. Disconnect the phone charger.

Step 2. Press and hold the Power and Volume Down keys simultaneously.

Step 3. Release the pressed keys when phone vibrates and then immediately press and hold the volume down button until the phone displays an exclamation mark (!) on the screen

Step 4. Release the volume down key.

Step 5. Then press the volume and power keys in the following order: volume up, volume down, power, and volume down.

Step 6. Wait for your phone to reset, during the reset you will see gears rotating on the screen for up to 5 minutes, after which the screen goes blank for 30 seconds and then your phone will restart.

If none of the above works you may want to consider returning the defective phone.

And another very simple but most cases effective way is just popping your SD card out...

already done removing sd card and all the things you said. fuckinh $@$* it doesnt work

mine does this every single time my phone goes dead or it freezes and I have to restart. It also does this after being frozen. there is not one thing that needs to be updated or changed when I do have to reset it. the gears seem to stay on my screen for a !&&* of a lot longer than 5 mins....I don't understand why it does this and its been only doing it for about 2 or 3 weeks and I've had the phone for about a year now. its so frustrating I want to throw it...but I won't!

I've had 2 Notes 4 in my business and for back up for over 20 years and now, FOR NO REASON IS CAN FIND ANYWHERE, have this darend annoying 2 soinning gears problem slowing the boot process whenever I need to put in a newly charged battery, I even tried a Factory Reset on my spare phone, set them up to copy all from man phone to back using the now place back to back until there's a beep or whatever with no beep or whatever. Tried a few time, gave up. The next day, booted the backup and, after the 2 gears, everything had tansferred when I wasn't there; just those 2 darned gears again!! This model served my luxury small passenger service with clients all over the world, for TWENTY years with NO PROBLEMS AT ALL until one day, for nor reason, or was it a simpleupdate somewhere, which I always do manually and decide for myself. I have tried about 8 newer models running higher versions of Android than 6.0.1 but hate the newer OS systems. I wish I ahd a record of the original Android versions on these phones as I'm sure the gear problem is related to the OS now being 6.0.1. If I knew how, I'd regrade the spare to plain v6 and rebuild all my apps manually. I've even tried doing this on the spare after a full reses, with not change.