Full factory reset + update procedure?

Hardware Librem 5
1

After reading the battery life has been doubled, I decided to dust off my L5 to check out the current state of the project. Unfortunately, after updating through the PureOS store, I encounter the following issues:

  1. When I tried to charge it from its included charger, after sitting in a desk drawer unused for months, it vibrated, the green light came on, the green light went off, and this repeated indefinitely. I had to grab a beefier charger (the one that came with my Steam Deck) to allow the phone to turn on and charge the battery.
  2. Battery percentage is always 10%. I left it charging and then let it discharge, repeating the process a couple of times, hoping it would recalibrate the charge metrics. But it won’t budge from 10%
  3. After turning off the screen, it would turn on again on its own after about a minute. A minute later it would dim, and another minute later turn off again. A minute later, the process repeats. This is with the phone sitting on my desk, without touching it. This appears to happen only when running off battery power, which makes me suspect it’s related to the 10% issue.
  4. When I open the battery status screen, when plugged in, it will say “Fully charged”, but still indicate 10%. When I unplug it, it will change to “Discharging”, and I get a warning toast for “Battery Low”, with “Unknown time” remaining.

I performed another update round today, issue 2 and 3 still persisted.

[UPDATE] Then I read that this could be resolved by removing and reinserting the battery, which I did, after turning off the phone. It now reports a plausible battery percentage, which seems to update in a plausible manner.

I’m afraid some update messed up the system. I’ve never used the phone for anything other than to sporadically turn it on (after months of sitting in a drawer), perform some updates, and evaluate its suitability as a daily driver. So not really sure how it managed to get so messed up, but that’s the state it’s currently in.

As a result, I’d like to reset the phone, and bring it up to date with the latest developments. As far as I understand, there are also BIOS updates one can perform, but they’re not part of the regular software update process.

My questions:

  • How do I fix the battery misreporting its charge state?
  • Apart from the BIOS update, is there anything else I need to take into account when trying to make my phone functionally equivalent to the ones currently being shipped?
  • Where are the BIOS update, the wipe & reinstall procedure, and anything else resulting from my previous question documented?
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https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/Development_Environment/Phone/Troubleshooting/Reflashing_the_Phone.html

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If you want to add encryption, don’t forget to specify the luks variant: Librem 5 Encryption Confusion

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Tips if you don’t have an OS with the uuu tool available :
Instead of trying to compile uuu and dependances to make the procedure working on your OS
You can use a liveCD or a liveUSB with ubuntu or variant, you will be able to ‘apt install uuu’ on the live OS to do the reflashing

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Yes and no. There’s no “BIOS” at all, so definitely no BIOS update. I assume you mean firmware updates for various hardware components.

Yes, there are some firmware updates but whether you should install them depends on whether you need them i.e. whether you are encountering any problems that are relevant. I would say that a phone switched off in a drawer encounters no problems :wink: so I would ignore any possible firmware updates at this stage.

FWIW, by reflashing the phone, you will automatically update uboot. So that’s at least one additional update taken care of.

The firmware you are most likely to need is updated mobile modem firmware but that depends on what country you are in i.e. its progress in adopting VoLTE and switching off the 3G network - and also depends on whether you will use suspend (which you probably will).

Otherwise: Manual Updates for Librem5

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Alright, thanks guys. I’ll check out those links