Yesterday I installed the update and restarted the phone. Everything was working fine. About an hour ago, I received another OTA notification for the same firmware update, but there was no option to download or install it — only a Restart button.
After restarting the phone, it no longer boots. It is stuck on the “Fairphone” screen and has been like that for more than 10 minutes.
What can I do?
Try to shutdown, then reboot…
I remember one case where booting took a very long time, so it might be worth just waiting. Difficult to say for how long, let’s say 2h.
And when you do so repeatedly (at least 7 times) system should fall back to previous install.
Unfortunately I’m not sure. The phone appears to have successfully booted the new version once, but maybe I misunderstand the fallback mechanism.
And why should it not fall back to the other slot which bootet fine? Thats what A/B devices are made for?
Sorry for the delay in replying.
Yes I absolutely agree, but my understanding is that the bootloader will attempt n (e.g. 7) times to boot the new version, and if repeatedly unsuccessful, will revert to the “old” slot, as long as the “new” slot is marked bootable, active but is not marked successful. But once a successful boot is accomplished, as is the case here, the new slot gets marked successful. So to my mind, it depends
(a) on whether the new slot was indeed marked successful, which seems likely:
(b) whether bootloader can revert after a succession of unsuccessful attempts to boot a slot marked “successful”. Hopefully yes, since the old slot is still marked bootable and successful too, and therefore a valid candidate. But I don’t really know, and the documentation doesn’t seem to be very clear on that point, hence my hesitation. I remember last year there was at least one reported case of an initially successful update that later rebooted and failed, much as richyboycaldo reports.
We dont know without trying and as there was an install attempt that failed, I would 100% try this first, thats the easiest thing to do and does not harm.
In the end, yes it failed, but not initially. OP said they had booted the new version and “everything was working fine” and to my mind it’s likely the new slot got marked successful. That’s the potential problem.
But sure, trying 7 more times can’t do any harm.
We can speculate lot and at the end we dont know for sure what happened, if the first attempt was even finished. However this speculation is just confusing and not really helping in my eyes.