FP3 next morning wouldnt show/turn on, after attaching it to charger, and trying again a START screen in green with misc debug and low level stuff shows

Help Fairphone 3
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  1. My guess is your system is still using the old fastboot version. The new one(s) may be installed, but the older one may be taking precedence. (See also the comment about PATH above).
  2. A hyphen followed by a space usually signals the end of the options to the programme. Chances are that you’re effectively running fastboot without any further command.

It means fastboot is waiting for a phone to be connected. If the phone is physically connected but fastboot cannot find it, then either the phone is not in fastboot mode or the drivers that are being used are not compatible.

Only one slot can be active at any time, as far as I’m aware (the android documentation suggests there can be more, but I don’t recall this for FP3). Apologies if this is stating the obvious and you just want to switch active slots, but this has caught out people before.

To fix the issues with fastboot, following the advice in the post above is a good idea.
Whether you need fastboot to fix this, I don’t know. If one of your slots does not boot because you switched off the device mid-update (at least, this is how I read one of your posts above), the other slot should at some point be tried automatically, as far as I know - but your mileage may vary.

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Thanks Elk for this step by step instruction and thanks Johannes for further explanations, which I’m always eager to hear!

I followed your steps and am now able to run fastboot and adb directly from CMD. But there where some drivers left in the system32 directory which I did’nt want to delete before further asking.
This are:

Now I’m again able to find my phone

but the problem still remains, except:

changed to:

and if I

It will return

remarkable is that the system will recognize a space between “–” and “set-active:a”
which i never tiped in.

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It should be set-active=a (= instead of : )

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My bad. Did it like this yesterday and It did’nt work
Did it today again like this + without a space after following your instructions properly and now my phone is working properly!

Big Thanks to you and Johannes!

1 Like
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To summarize for other people having the same issue which is beeing stuck in fastbood mode:

You’re stuck in fastboot mode if your screen shows something like this:

and the 4 options (start / restart bootloader / recovery mode / power off) will only bring you back to this screen after rebooting your phone.

Then you should do as followed:

First try a soft reset by pulling the battery, sim cards and memory stick out and in again. If this is not working, then:

Download the newest

A link is provided further down

Connect your phone to your computer and

Extract the .zip and click shift + right mouse
you will see the option to start a power shell mode: do it
Check if your device is recogniced by your PC by typing:
fastboot devices
if you get a response you might proceed.

You might find this Code near the top:

If this is the case go for

Then it should return something like this:
Setting current slot to 'b' OKAY [ 0.016s]
Finished. Total time: 0.031s

Then type fastboot reboot

which should give you a response similar to
Rebooting OKAY [ 0.016s]
Finished. Total time: 0.016s

If this is not working try:
fastboot --set-active=b
fastboot reboot

If this is still not working you might have a problem with different versions of fastboot.

Then you should follow this guide:

Redo

If it is still not working I dont have any more clues :wink:
Thanks for this fast and great help to k4y0z, AnotherElk and Johannes!