Hi everyone,
I’m posting here because I desperately look elsewhere for a fix. Sadly I haven’t anything.
So here’s the issue.
Both my power and volume buttons are done. It happened a few month ago. I wasn’t much bothered about it since I found a way to set the volume up and down without using the side buttons.
One week end ago, I accidentally switched off my phone. And I can’t restart it since :
My power button doesn’t work. I thought it was because some dirt got stuck between the button and the contact push button. But I cleaned it and nothing changed.
I didn’t activate the developer mod on my phone, which means I can’t use ADB to boot from my Linux Distro
It’s really nerve breaking because I can see the phone working when I plug it.
I checked, fixing the volume button means sending it back to Fairphone team, since the volume button is fixed on the motherboard, a piece, sadly, not available for self repair.
I heard about something called “Jig cables” which used to force recover boot on some Samsung Qualcomm chipset devices. But I understand that those cables are old tech since they are mini USB and not USB C.
I’d still try to get those buttons repaired via Fairphone pretty soon, or at least you could maybe perform regular backups, in case something else fails in the phone, without a workaround being available.
Hahaha, well I just played around with different sequences of connecting the charger and removing the battery. I thought that there might be a way to trick the phone into thinking, that it crashed and it would therefore attempt a direct boot into the OS.
But after I got one or two unreproducible random direct boots, I figured out, that the “bootup signal” when connecting a charger and the “check if we should just display the charging animation instead of direct booting” are far enough apart, so that I arrived at the solution I posted.
Just my curiosity (I though it was a fun puzzle to solve), some trial and error and a pinch of theory crafting, I guess.
Oh my god, thank you so much! I have the same problem with my power button. I thought I had tried everything… I managed to keep my phone alive for 6 months using a power bank to start it.
Today, the battery died because I forgot my power bank at home. I thought I’d have to buy a new phone, especially since Fairphone support isn’t responding either.
Anyway, thank you so much – you’re my hero!
I thought it might help others to test zalamander’s trick on other Fairphone models, too. Nice outcomes:
Fairphone It works as described (FP6 vibrates just faintly). Fairphone It works as described. Fairphone see zalamander’s post Fairphone * It works, but vibration precedes the FAIRPHONE logo here,
so disconnect the charger when it vibrates. Fairphone * It does not work. Fairphone It does not work.
* The FP3 and the FP2 I tested this with are on /e/OS. If you have any of these two (or both) devices running Android OS (Fairphone OS), feel free to test the trick on yours as well and let us know. However, I’m somewhat confident that there will not be a difference.
Fairphone 
It works as described (FP6 vibrates just faintly).
It works as described.
see 
* It works, but vibration precedes the FAIRPHONE logo here,
Fairphone 
* It does not work.
It does not work.