FP1 wont start. Loading screen appears for 1 second, then reboot

[maalik]

Hello everybody,

I’m trying to bring back the FP1 of my flatmate. The battery is emtpy. When iI start it, only the background light will turn on for 1 second).

When i put it on USB, my PC recognizes it but directly plays the “USB removed” sound. On the FP I can see the battery loading symbol for 5 seconds.

ADB doesn’t show it

Have you any hints or tips, how I can further try to reactivate the FP?

Best Regards
Felix

[Johannes]

You’ll need to have some charge in the battery to boot far enough for any troubleshooting. I’ve even had cases where it was difficult to get the battery to charge, as loading the charging screen took too much power to load. In these cases cleaning the USB port and/or using a different charger usually helped.
If you have a universal battery charger you can also try charging the battery in that - it should at least give you an indication of whether the battery still works. Also, note that a common fault in FP1s is a broken USB port - depending on the defect charging may still work (requires two wires) when ADB (four wires) no longer does.

[maalik]

Hey,

thanks for your reply. After searching for the last 2 hours, i found similar problems. It’s most probably a broken power button which constantly reboots the phone. I managed to enter recovery mode.

When i do the key test, I open the test mode and after 1 second, the “power button” line will disappear, and shortly after that also “volume down” and “volume up”. Is this supposed to happen? I thought that they will only disappear, when I press the buttons?

Can you confirm this?

[Johannes]

Unfortunately, I can’t test at the moment.

I hadn’t thought of the power button, as I was under the impression that the reboot loop takes ~10 seconds in that case, which is longer than you were describing. I’m probably misremembering though.

[maalik]

Hey,

I didn’t thought that, but I managed to repair it. After entering the recovery and doing some test, I wasn’t able anymore, to access the recovery. After letting it “load” for 1 hour, I managed to enter some other recovery:

Can't get out of recovery system mode!

I turned on my phone this morning and accidently pressed the volume button too. Now I’m stuck in the system recovery mode. Acctually in two different kinds. The only way to get it to start again is to remove the battery, and then sometimes the standard Android system recovery thing starts and sometimes another menu comes up with some chinese signs and the english translation. (See pictures below) When I try to just turn it on, the normal blue screen comes up which says “Loading” and a few secon…

Watch the image. First I only entered the right mode, for some reason I was then able to enter the left mode.

There I did a factory reset and the Fairphone works again.

Thank you nevertheless!

[Stefan]

@Johannes

I hadn’t thought of the power button, as I was under the impression that the reboot loop takes ~10 seconds in that case, which is longer than you were describing. I’m probably misremembering though.

I do think that bootloops that are caused by a broken power button are quite fast (only one or two seconds between the screen flashing up and dying again).