My L14 is 3 years old and the battery health has degraded to ~50%. I’m not sure if that’s what’s causing this issue though:
When I power it on, the machine boots normally but at some random point (sometimes at PureBoot stage, sometimes when starting the Linux kernel), it shuts down abruptly and reboots. I thought this is a power issue, so I tried to select “Power Off” on PureBoot menu. The command line shows that it’s powering off, but the laptop boots up again! I simply can’t power off this machine and it just keeps rebooting, never actually reaching the Linux desktop environment.
Running PureBoot 27, and I am unable to upgrade to 28.x because of the boot loop.
Can you boot into a PureOS image on a USB drive? You may need to update the EC firmware first before updating PureBoot later. For now, reinstall the battery and keep the Librem 14 connected to the wall outlet.
My EC firmware is up to date, running 1.13. Unfortunately I’m unable to boot into neither the Linux distro on my SSD nor any OS on USB drive. The boot process abruptly stops at some point and restarts.
I’ve reconnected the battery and left the laptop connected to AC power, as you suggested.
When I had issues similiar to yours, I learned that my NVMe drives were somehow incorrectly seated, so try removing and reseating them to see if your situation changes.
There are a few other things I recall during the time I had similar issues:
Poor airflow/ventilation
Very high ambient temperature
So in addition, I suggest cleaning out the fan grilles for increased airflow and ensuring your environment is within room temperature. Lastly, remove all other connected peripherals to ensure that nothing else can interfere during the bootup process.
I tried reseating the NVMe disk, removed the back cover entirely for better airflow, ambient temperature is around 72 F, and have no peripherals connected. However, nothing seems to help.
I see the green charging LED when either the barrel connector or the USB-C charger is connected. So battery seems to be charging and both power input ports seem to be working correctly.
However, the boot loop doesn’t occur when the laptop is on battery power. My battery health is bad, so I wasn’t able to keep my OS running for too long, but there was no boot loop when the device was running on battery power with no AC power input. As soon as I plugged in the barrel connector when the battery LED started blinking red, the laptop abruptly shutdown and went into boot loop again.
Okay, I suggest contacting Purism support. They will probably request that you send in your Librem 14 to replace the battery and for further troubleshooting.
Agreed about the number of issues for the Librem 14. That sucks.
It could be that the AC to DC brick for the barrel connector is no longer delivering an appropriate amount of power. You could check the voltage and amperage being delivered. That said, if you’ve tried the USB-C (PD) and barrel charger and both have the same issue, that doesn’t seem likely.
That sounds a lot like the problem I encountered with my L5.
My battery was nearly depleted so I connected my power supply and continued working on my L5.
After an hour or so, my L5 suddenly was shut down and started a boot loop as you have been getting with your Librem 14.
As soon as I removed the power supply, the L5 started up normally.
My battery was still almost empty so I attached again the power supply.
The L5 immediately started to reboot and went into that loop again.
Long story short: It seems that the cable and/or the power supply is causing this problem.
After using another power supply (and cable), the L5 booted normally and my battery was charging as expected.
Maybe your issue is also caused by a defect power supply unit or cable.
I did suspect the power supply brick or cable to be faulty, and so I did try the USB-C PD. I have a separate 65W USB-C power supply adapter which works fine with my work laptop. However, with the Librem 14 I was stuck in a boot loop even with this USB-C power adapter.
So I suspect the issue might not be in the external power supply peripherals, but likely in the motherboard’s power input circuitry. Either in the hardware, or in the firmware – but my EC firmware is up to date.
