Hi, I experienced a similar problem and I’m asking for help here.
What happend:
Sunday evening I used my FP2 until only 3% of battery was left. Put it to charge before I went to bed at 11pm (UTC+1). Phone worked fine.
Monday morning the phone restarts every now and then, without me doing anything. I have the impression the more load it has – app opened – the earlier it restarts. I suspected some problem with the battery. Setting the screen brightness very low seemed to help, but it was hard to get that done even. My red-filter app didn’t start, the swipe-down menu showed only one line of icons and no notifications. When opening an app the home button wouldn’t work anymore. In general the phone was not usable anymore.
Monday evening I thought it was a good idea to update the Fairphone OS. (I guess it wasn’t, I have no record what version I was on at that point) After downloading the image, the FP2 restarted, and at some point came into TWRP saying no OS was installed and “/system” was not found. Under “/cache” I found the image and tried to install it with TWRP “Install” option. It failed. after a reboot TWRP appeared again, but “/cache” was empty now.
Monday night I followed this guide to manually update the OS for my FP2. The script completed the validation but then silently was in a busy wait. I couldn’t understand why.
Tuesday morning I learned about fastboot and desperately ran the manual update script sudo sh flash-for-unix.sh which – this time – found my FP2 and proceeded to flash the device. It failed with the error FAILED (remote: flash write failure) when writing system. I read about differing versions of fastboot and tried the same on another machine. This time it fails at writing 'modem' with FAILED (remote: flash write failure).
My questions:
What does the flash write failure mean? Is there some resource on that? Does it have to do with too little space on the internal storage? How could I – at this point – free up some space?
What is the safest way to proceed now? Do I already have lost my data, or is it still possible to just update the system and get my apps/contacts/data restored?
When I flash it, it keeps giving me errors but I kept trying and eventually, one of those attempts will work (I knot it’s silly: if you do the same thing step by step, it should yield the same result, but it doesn’t in this case) That on the flashing.
I haven’t tried the safe mode yet or installing Android 9. I will go for those options before going to factory settings (this is really the last option for me). It seems someone lost the data in the SD card, so I suggest that, if you have one in, you take it out and then play around.
Yesterday evening, in one of the spells before reboot, I erased a bunch of apps. It would reboot after every 2 apps uninstalled. After 3 rounds of this, it stopped rebooting. I had a usable phone for a while. Decided to give it a go with the SIMs + SD. It started rebooting again (even though I took the SIMs and SD off again)
Planning on a safemode when I have time today, but if someone tries that before, let us know.
It does sound like we have the same issue. Following also the advice of @Volker, I think I will go for a factory reset as well, sadly… (Just to clarify: I use no SD card and my internal memory is not even close to being full. So I don’t think that explains it, @Otolio.)
In summary, this is what I plan to do:
Back up data.
Do a factory reset.
I then need to update to Android 9 manually or I can use the Updater? This wasn’t clear to me.
After a simple night without any use, my FP2 turned out very unstable. Many settings were a mess (touching a key caused a buzz etc), the “home” key didn’t work anymore and the OS was extremely unstable. While I tried to return to my original settings the phone rebooted maybe 30 times.
I tried to update the OS (was still using Android 7), but the Updater was stuck. It turned out, that I couldn’t update any app. Finally I updated to Android 9 manually. That solved the problems with the unstable OS, but I still can’t update the apps, and the “home” key does’nt work: I can’t go back to the home screen other than using the < key repeatedly.
There must be some setting preventing the updates and somehow the home key is switched off. I tried several options, but have no idea how to fix this.
Anyone with a solution??
This problem with Android 7 was reported before, and no solution was found in all the discussions. It struck my FP2 quite a while ago all of a sudden too.
The only way out is to reset the phone to factory settings.
And do you mind if we merge this thread with the one you just linked? Just so all instances of this issue are in one place - I’m sure these won’t be the only two cases.
Yes, it fixed the problems (home button not functioning, unstable OS, no downloads possible, so no email and no app-updates). At least until now no spontaneous reboots
And yes, you can merge the threads.
I may try the safe mode too, perhaps later today, although I haven’t installed any new apps in a while and so doubt it will reveal anything… Still, I agree that the factory reset doesn’t sound so cool!
EDIT: after 1 reboot (maybe 2 if I didn’t see it), it is stable now on safe mode. Managed to upload some files to Google drive, will continue after work.
To whomever has not multiple GB of storage left, I would not recommend updating from Android 7 to 9 to fix this issue. I tried this earlier this year and because I didn’t have enough disk space I got stuck in TWRP. I got out of it without updating but with a lot of hassle and it was not worth it.
It seems this is hitting a lot of people still using Android 7.
The only thing I can think of to happen on Monday was the NL Alert test here in the Netherlands - perhaps there’s a chance that the alert really messes up older systems? Seems unlikely but I can’t imagine what else happened that could affect multiple phones. If this also affects people outside of the Netherlands, I have no idea what it could be.
I have the same problems, started yesterday (6 dec-monday) . I wanted to back up the data, I could not make the data transfer possible to my mac, because the notification data/or charge is not popping up. Running the phone on safe mode and airplane mode on resolved the continuous rebooting problem, however, the main buttins on the screen stioll do not work. The problem with my phone started before the NL -alert.
Hi @GeeDee I needed to install manually, since my Updater couldn’t download the update (I wasn’t able to update any other app either).
I had to update the device driver first, after that it went smooth. The best instruction for a manual update I found in Fairphone 2 FPOS manual update (using Windows 10)
Update: I just charged my phone overnight to 100% while it was off. Then I took the SD card out and restarted the phone. It seems a lot more stable now. I’ve been using my phone for 15 minutes straight without any reboots. This has not happened since monday night 03:15 AM or yesterday midday. However I still cannot use the home button nor the app list button on the right. For some reason the phone seems a bit more responsive and fast than before all these problems started on monday.
Questions:
can anybody with the same problem replicate this result?
what should I do now that I dont have the SD card in and I can’t use 2 of the screen buttons?
how do I make the buttons usable again, and use my SD card for storage again?
