My FP1 is suddenly getting extremely unstable and irreliable

I have something similar, so I post here.

My FP1 is suddenly getting extremely unstable and irreliable.

  • Fennec no longer runs, crashes on start. Using Icecat now instead
  • Öffi crashed yesterday on start. Rebootet, ran again.
  • Opened a mail in K9 today, the whole device froze. Reboot stalled at the “FAIRPHONE” screen.
  • Got into recovery mode (volume up+power on)
  • recovery boot: “Keine Befehle” (no commands)
  • decided to do factory reset, therefore, chose “user data backup”
  • it reported to make a backup, then again, nothing
  • typed the power button again
  • then, suddenly, it turned into “Systemaktualisierung”, running for appr 2 hours
  • then, again “kein befehl”
  • then, back in (text screen mode) menu, displaying:
    Error: read error (8 times)
    Error: write error
    Error: Short write

Now, what…?

Update: Did a factory reset. After boot, stalled on the “FAIRPHONE” screen again.
:-((

I disagree that this is related to the topic you posted this in, so I moved it to a new topic.

OK, so here is what I did next:

I still had the Macadamia alpha ZIP on my SD card.

  • into recovery mode again
  • selected “install from SD card”
  • selected the Macadamia alpha ZIP
  • run install.

Now, it boots again. But I need to install all my stuff from scratch, since the Backup App offers me only contacts, not apps.
The Backup function from the recovery menu, BTW, did NOT backup anything.

How long will it last this time? Are the hours of work worth it?

It seems it is time to look for a new phone.

It will not be a Fairphone. I am sorry.

Update: It’s not over yet. :-/

I had to reboot to put my SIM card back in.

Now, on boot, I get a different animation! The standard, glowing “android” screen rather than the Fairphone animation.
And after the boot, the contacts app is gone. WTF?! Without an address book, the phone is useless.

Update. Music player crashing too. Plus, neither Mail nor K9 accept the CORRECT Mail password. Sorry, I am so sick of this. Can all this madness be caused by the alpha status of Macadamia? It ran smoothly over a year. Back to Kola Nut?

Tired and frustrated

Last update.

My FP1 is definitely broken now.

Thought Macadamia could be the problem and turned back to Kola Nut. Still lots of malfunctions. Connection suddenly lost. After shutdown, took ages to start rebooting. When it did, K9 Mail was gone. Photos gone, too. After the next boot, K9 is back, but the file structure is completely different, only 5 folders in the internal memory.

Must be a hardware failure.

Bye-bye, then…

You should wipe data before you install experimental builds.

That said, you should give this a try (after wiping data): Android KitKat (4.4.4) for FP1

2 Likes

What do you mean by experimental? Macadamia? It ran for more than half a year without issues. As I wrote above, I turned back to Kola Nut and have malfunctions also.
No, that cannot be the reason. It looks like hardware failure.

My guess would storage hardware failure. Probably internal memory, but a small chance that that the SD card is causing issues and an even smaller chance it’s a SIM (but you’ve checked for that).

(Bold by me)

So not all hope it lost. :wink:

That quote, Stefan, as I read it, means that going back to Kola Nut does wipe the phone, not that you need to wipe the data manually before installing.

Apart from that, what do you think happened in my case? I installed M. alpha without manually wiping anything before, and now, all kinds of malfunctions suddenly appear because I failed to do so seven months ago? Sorry, that makes no sense.

Johannes may be right. Especially, since, for example, K9 Mail crashed several times in the moment when I tried to open an E-Mail, i.e., a memory access.

You can only be sure if you boot into #dic:safemode or better do a #dic:hardreset (if system files are corrupt).

And yes, it does mean that you have to wipe manually. Changing your ROM doesn’t wipe your phone, but if there are no update instructions the ROM doesn’t know where to move the files from the old ROM (downgrading is not the usual update direction). That was by the way one of the major challenges for Fairphone’s Android 7 upgrade: Prepering everything in a way that upgrading wouldn’t result in a data loss. Recent news show that not even Microsoft is infallible in this regard (the latest Windows update was pulled because users lost documents etc.).

I installed M. alpha according to the instructions I found here back then, and IIRC, there was no mention of a manual wipe before running the install. Maybe I missed it, don’t have the link now.
Also, any malfunctions caused by this should have appeared directly after installing M alpha, not seven months later. So I am sceptical if you’re right, but I consider to give it one final try, maybe with that new 4.4.4 version that was released in the meantime. Thanks for your input.

To clarify: Upgrading should (is not guaranteed to) work, but downgrading most probably doesn’t.