Is my PinePhone Pro dead?

[jlioret]

Dear community,

I really feel stuck with my Pinephone Pro Explorer Edition, purchased last year and abandoned for almost a year, after so may unsuccessful attempts to have it working.

Today, the only way I can have it showing sign of life is connecting it in MASK ROM mode and havind a lsusb command in a terminal on my Linux PC.

All the attempts that I have made to power on my device have failed.

To discard the drained battery issue, I have purchased from Pine64 a battery charging station.

So now what?

Thanks to Staytuned a post that I wrote last year had received a solution that does not work any more.

Since last year, it seems that things have changed, with regards to multi-boot possibilities, using tow-boot or u-boot.

I would be so grateful if someone could describe in detail a working process to bring my Pinephone Pro back to life, whichever the os distribution used.

Looking forward.

Best regards,
Jerome Lioret

[dchang0]

If you can get to MASKROM mode, it will charge the battery in that state (unless the battery is so old it cannot hold a charge), but it will take a very long time to charge it.
Get it into MASKROM mode, make sure it stays in MASKROM mode, and just let it sit there, charging off of the computer, for at least 2 hours.

It probably won't reach 100%, but it should charge the battery enough to where you can boot the phone up properly and then hook it up to a dedicated smartphone charger.

[dchang0]

Dear community,

I really feel stuck with my Pinephone Pro Explorer Edition, purchased last year and abandoned for almost a year, after so may unsuccessful attempts to have it working.

Today, the only way I can have it showing sign of life is connecting it in MASK ROM mode and havind a lsusb command in a terminal on my Linux PC.

All the attempts that I have made to power on my device have failed.

To discard the drained battery issue, I have purchased from Pine64 a battery charging station.

So now what?

Thanks to Staytuned a post that I wrote last year had received a solution that does not work any more.

Since last year, it seems that things have changed, with regards to multi-boot possibilities, using tow-boot or u-boot.

I would be so grateful if someone could describe in detail a working process to bring my Pinephone Pro back to life, whichever the os distribution used.

Looking forward.

Best regards,
Jerome Lioret

I was in a very similar situation as you--bought the phone a while ago, couldn't really get it working, had the dreaded totally-dead battery issue (but knew exactly what it was).

I also bought the factory battery charging cradle so that I wouldn't have to deal with the MASKROM method of fixing a totally dead battery. It works great.
Charge the battery to full, then pop it in and let us know how far you can get with the phone.

In the last two weeks I have tried many of the latest OSes and also TowBoot and u-boot and also upgraded the modem firmware (required to fix the failure to wake from suspend seen in Mobian and possibly Manjaro). The PPP is now pretty usable for me.

There were some scary moments where I thought I bricked the phone but holding the RE button to boot from microSD got me out of it in the end. I wiped the SPI and then installed the latest Tow-Boot and since then have not had trouble booting.