Black screen after update

Hardware Librem 5
1

Saturday morning, 3/11/2023, I powered up my phone, checked for an update, and installed that OS update. I was later using firefox and that’s when the phone crashed and I’ve been having a black screen (the display still lit, but black) ever since.

I’ve pulled the battery, I’ve held the power button until it shutdown and tried powering back up - but all I get is a black screen that’s back-lit.

Anyway to resolve this?

2

Is the phone pingable on the local network?

3

I’m thinking probably not since it can’t even boot.

4

You should be able to boot, holding down the power button for 20 seconds. Another question is, if you can enter the disk encryption key, is this also not visible? If so, this can’t be an OS issue, because the OS isn’t booted. Try moving (without seeing them) the slider for the screen light, which is located at 55mm from the upper border of the screen-

5

I never held the power button down for 20 seconds, but I did that just now a few times, and still not getting the phone to boot. No, the enter the disk encryption key is not coming up.
I should mention that when I hold the power button, the green dot light on top does come on and the phone does do the little vibrate like it’s about to boot, but just never gets to booting; never even see the Librem 5 logo.

6

I would contact customer support;
support@puri.sm

7

So … to confirm: you are using the LUKS variant (you have chosen disk encryption) and a prompt for the disk encryption key was previously coming up?

Assuming “yes” to both then my next suggestion would be to use Jumpdrive to boot the phone and, if successful, examine the state of the two partitions on the eMMC drive.

8

I’m so new to Linux that I’m not sure what LUKS means, but I can confirm that when I first received my phone, that prompt to enter the password for disk encryption was already there. I had to quickly read through the 4 page doc that was included to see what the default password was.

For your 2nd question, yes, the password screen was previously coming up.

I’m not exactly sure how to do this Jumpdrive - would you elaborate?

9

OK. LUKS stands for “Linux Unified Key Setup”. You can take “LUKS disk” as being synonymous with “encrypted disk”, and “LUKS variant” means choosing to use an encrypted disk when you initially installed the software on the Librem 5 (although in this case I gather that that choice was made by Purism on your behalf), as distinct from choosing to use an unencrypted disk when you initially installed the software.

In view of that, the right answer is probably: Black screen after update

but for future reference

What it is: Jumpdrive allows you to mount the Librem 5’s internal disk on a host computer even when the Librem 5 won’t boot normally or is misbehaving in some way. (From there you would examine the contents of the disk to see what, if anything, is evident about what has gone wrong, and, where applicable, fix it.)

How to use it: Updated today , now phone won't turn on/start up

10

Thank you. I’ll see about getting a computer with linux on it and see if I could do this.
I’ll keep you in the loop :wink:

11

I was able to get a Linux Mint, and followed the instructions to install that uuu and such. But when it came time to mount my phone, there was no harddrive that showed up (I went to Computer, and under File System).

I’m thinking this is a bit beyond my capabilities…so I’ll contact support.

Thank you for all the help

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