Fairphone 2 update to android 9 didn't work - why is doing a manual update such a 'roulette'?

Hi,

I have for a couple of years a Fairphone 2. I kept it on Android 7 for quite a while, but today I’ve decided to go for Android 9.
The automatic update failed (I want to keep this message short, so I won’t put the details here). So I had to do a manual update. It took a while to understand how to do this, and to get the connection between my windows computer the links in Fairphone 2 Android Update failed, phone broken now - #20 by Saphira were very helpful. Thanks!

But when I run the flash-for-windows.bat for version 21.12.0 I get the following error:

The error message says to try it all over again. I have done this, but I then keep getting the same error, but at different places during the update. I have already ran it for at least 20 times. I’ve only kept account where it crashed after a while. Score until now is that it:

  • crashed 2 times while writing ‘system 2/4’
  • crashed 4 times while writing ‘system 3/4’
  • crashed 7 times while writing ‘modem’.

And after each crash I have to remove the battery (to turn the FP2 off), remove the USB cable, restart the phone in fastboot, connect the USB cable and start over again.

So what do I know:

  • recovery mode on my phone doesn’t work: it gives a picture of a ‘dead’ android with a red triangle.
  • the FP2 is in fastboot mode, because I see the blue flashing LED
  • the connection between the windows laptop and the FP2 works as well (because when it didn’t I got an error before reaching this step of the batch file)
  • the images have been unzipped on my computer
  • it seems to manage to flash a couple of files, but not all of them
  • In Manual reboot FP2 failed I’ve found someone with a very similar error, but that whas when updating to version 21.03.0
  • I get the same error when I try to manually flash an older version of android (I’ve tried 19.11.2)

Why is this such a ‘roulette’? Is there a bad connection somewhere? I’ve tried cleaning up the connections in my FP2, but I don’t see any improvement.

I keep trying to flash the image, hoping that eventually it will reach the end. If it doesn’t work, what should I do?

Thanks in advance!

I should have written this post earlier, because finally it seems that flashing did work. Took at least 25 tries, if not more. As written above I haven’t started counting in which file the flashing stopped only after a while. But the score after that were:

  • 2 crashes during system 2/4
  • 4 crashes during system 3/4
  • 2 crashes during system 4/4
  • 10 crashes during modem

Is it my phone that flashing took so long? Or is there another reason?

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