Pinephone not booting, always vibrating
#1
My pinephone (postmarketOS edition) was on, and working normally when it immediately turned off. It can be that the battery is flat.

When plugging in the power, the red light turns on, and the phone immediately starts vibrating without stopping. Screen remains black.

Same behavior without battery.

What can I try to resolve the issue?
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#2
(11-28-2021, 01:03 PM)alexander12 Wrote: My pinephone (postmarketOS edition) was on, and working normally when it immediately turned off. It can be that the battery is flat.

When plugging in the power, the red light turns on, and the phone immediately starts vibrating without stopping. Screen remains black.

Same behavior without battery.

What can I try to resolve the issue?

Try recharging the battery, either using an external charger if you have one or just plug the phone in with the battery installed, leaving the phone turned off. If the battery won't charge up try a different battery. (I had one go bad on me, it does happen.)
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#3
(11-28-2021, 03:48 PM)Zebulon Walton Wrote:
(11-28-2021, 01:03 PM)alexander12 Wrote: My pinephone (postmarketOS edition) was on, and working normally when it immediately turned off. It can be that the battery is flat.

When plugging in the power, the red light turns on, and the phone immediately starts vibrating without stopping. Screen remains black.

Same behavior without battery.

What can I try to resolve the issue?

Try recharging the battery, either using an external charger if you have one or just plug the phone in with the battery installed, leaving the phone turned off. If the battery won't charge up try a different battery. (I had one go bad on me, it does happen.)

Thanks for the response. Did your phone also vibrate when the battery went bad?

When I plug it in with the battery, it draws 0.25 amps, but when I plug it in without the battery it also draws 0.25 amps. When I hold the power button, the red light goes off, and it stops vibrating, but then the amp draw is 0.00 amps.

The phone has two states now
1) Being completely off
2) The red light is on, nothing on screen, vibrating all the time.

I seem to recall that I could previously boot the phone without a battery, but I'm not sure.

Could someone confirm if a working pinephone can be booted without a battery?
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#4
Whether it will boot without battery depends on the charger, and perhaps on the phone version. My Brave Heart will boot with the charger from a Nexus 5X (not Power Delivery compliant) with a 'normal' boot process - when the power cable is connected the LED lights up green for a few seconds before the screen comes up with the disk decryption gui which is normal for my oldish mobian with FDE. It won't boot with the charger from a Pixel 3A (Power Delivery I think...) - when the power cable is plugged in nothing happens, and pressing the power button does nothing. Note that in the first case if I insert the battery after it boots it doesn't show the correct (>90%) battery level but something very low. I don't know if this would have corrected itself if left longer or not.

if you've got a suitable serial interface cable you could try the bootloader console via the headphone socket. You could also try booting from uSD in case the bootloader or rootfs were corrupted during the sudden power off. I don't know what the behaviour is if no bootloader is found - it's supposed to go into FEL mode but I don't know if that would do anything for LED or vibrate motor.
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#5
(11-28-2021, 01:03 PM)alexander12 Wrote: My pinephone (postmarketOS edition) was on, and working normally when it immediately turned off. It can be that the battery is flat.

When plugging in the power, the red light turns on, and the phone immediately starts vibrating without stopping. Screen remains black.

Same behavior without battery.

What can I try to resolve the issue?

What happened in the end. I am experiencing the same issue now.
  Reply
#6
(12-31-2022, 04:29 AM)mruser1 Wrote:
(11-28-2021, 01:03 PM)alexander12 Wrote: My pinephone (postmarketOS edition) was on, and working normally when it immediately turned off. It can be that the battery is flat.

When plugging in the power, the red light turns on, and the phone immediately starts vibrating without stopping. Screen remains black.

Same behavior without battery.

What can I try to resolve the issue?

What happened in the end. I am experiencing the same issue now.

@mruser1 and @alexander12 , the phone won't boot with a drained battery (or if the installation got corrupted). One of the things which will still boot is Jumpdrive. Please download https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Ju...one.img.xz, flash it on a microSD card (for example using Balena Etcher) and then insert the microSD card in the top slot and boot/reboot the phone.

From there the phone can be let charged (and the eMMC reflashed if the installation became corrupted) in Jumpdrive.
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#7
(12-31-2022, 04:29 AM)mruser1 Wrote: What happened in the end. I am experiencing the same issue now.

Unfortunately, I don't recall exactly what the issue was, but, I did get it working 100% again.

I don't have an external charger for the battery, and, I think it didn't charge by just plugging it in.

Perhaps I charged it for a while in jumpdrive.

Good luck.
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#8
Chiming in because I had the same behavior. I have an older charger that gives out only the required voltage to try to extend the life of the battery. I also have a quickcharge one for another phone which supplies way too much power.

I took it off the dock (which probably also wasn't helping) and plugged it into that. Booted normally without issue and this was even easier than using the JumpDrive method.
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