My Librem 5 USA got snagged on a USB cable and fell off a table while charging. Now the green LED will come on but it fails to boot.
I tried reseating the modem, WiFi, SIM, and microSD but no love. I think it is done for.
Can anyone give me advice as what action to take? Does Purism (or any one for that matter) repair broken Librem phones? Do I just need to replace it?
Try removing and reinserting the battery, then holding the power button for 15 seconds to long reset the Librem 5.
Yes.
Yes, if my suggestion above does not produce any changes.
All it does is cycle the green light off to on with a vibrate response indicating it is rebooting. But it still hangs with the green light and fails to boot.
I suppose I need to email support@puri.sm to inquire about a repair. I know they are currently backlogged.
I have sent off a message to their support email. If any one knows of a better way to contact their repair department please let me know.
Thanks for the advice.
Green light working supposedly means good boot loader I think. But if you can’t get past that, any chance that the eMMC got scrambled? … or that the screen doesn’t work?
I had a laptop that I dropped one time have an issue where the screen no longer had light. Took me the longest time to realize that the laptop actually was turning on! You had to shine an extremely, extremely bright light on the screen to see it at all! But then when you did see, there was something there.
I’d say do that light test, and look for visuals without light on the screen (literally, like, when this happened to my laptop in 2014 I know this sounds like I just had bad eye sight bad that wasn’t it, the screen was literally black s though off, and then under a high-powered light there was actually the whole normally functioning OS there.)
Presumably it should be showing the Librem 5 logo, then LUKS unlock screen if you can get the high powered light on it.
Then if that fails and you see nothing no matter what you do, maybe try Jumpdrive. See if a PC can mount the eMMC. If so, now is a good time to make a backup image!
And you can do all of these things in parallel with contacting Purism.
Suggestion: Boot with both WiFi and modem killed.
Try to boot Jumpdrive on the phone. That will boot even if the eMMC drive is unhappy and you may then be able to do some troubleshooting on the state of the eMMC drive. There are failure scenarios where Jumpdrive might fail to boot at all but at least that would shed some light.
But, yes, it may ultimately be that it needs to go in for repair.
Thanks for the suggestions. But no love.
Turning off the Wifi and modem has no effect on the boot.
The phone won’t go into USB mode. Holding the + Vol button while pressing the power causes the phone to not power on. I have held it for a minute and the LED remains off.
The only functionality I have is the LED will light up red when USB is connected but phone is off. It will light green when booting. And it will light up amber when USB is connected and the phone is on.
Vibrate does trigger when the phone powers on. The phone seems to be mostly dead. No Librem 5 logo displays on the screen during the hung boot process.
Nothing I try shows the phone in a lsusb listing.
Does the green LED turn off after a few seconds from powering on, or does it stay on indefinitely?
No LED is supposed to shine up in USB mode.
The green light stays on indefinitely. Unless I hold the power button for about 10 seconds to power the phone off or remove the battery.
I’d try harder to establish USB communication in flashing mode (various ports, various cables, both orientations etc.). If that doesn’t help, it would be illuminating to tap into serial console (UART1) and read the bootloader’s logs; it’s somewhat involved though: Serial Console · Wiki · Librem5 / Librem 5 Community Wiki · GitLab
It may also be worth opening the case and checking whether the display connection and connection between main board and USB-C board are intact.
I did try 2 ports and 2 cables. The ports and cables work with other USB devices so I ruled them out.
I would be interested in seeing what if any information could be retrieved from UART1. However I am not currently tooled up to do that.
I could try taking it apart further. The phone does have a broken internal frame issue which I have been waiting on Purism to let me purchase a replacement. The breakage is now worse than it was when I opened that ticket. The root of the problem may simply be that the phone is too warped for everything to be in proper contact.
Make sure to try USB-A ports as well if you used USB-C (and vice versa). But yeah, the problem is likely deeper than USB.
I had used a couple of USB-C cables that work for other devices. Now I tried a USB-A and all of my open computer ports and still the same behavior.
It is funny since it has been a full year, but I thought I would post an update. My Librem 5 USA works again!
I took it to a local phone repair shop back in May and after working with the guy for a couple of months, sending him documentation and so forth, we managed to get the phone to boot. It started booting once he opened up the phone to attach a USB cable. We don’t really know what was wrong.
I had Purism send me a new mid frame kit to replace the broken parts in the body, and now the phone looks like new.
However the phone’s days as my mobile phone are over. I will keep it safely at home and only use it for testing software to extend its life.
Good thing I have it working too as I see Muscle Buddy’s fast nav buttons are too touchy on the Librem 5’s touchscreen. Now that I know that is happening I can fix that for the beta 3 release.
I did not know about this app. I guess it is this one: Linux | Muscle Buddy
I will try it out later!
That is the one.
I am close to releasing a 3rd beta which has a lot of small bug fixes. Including the one I did yesterday for the Librem 5’s touchscreen glitching on fast nav buttons.
The next beta includes an installer/setup tool in an AppImage package which helps with the installation.
If you want to wait, the 3rd Beta is only a few days away. I am presently working on building a larger demo database as an installation option. I am trying to get the package polished enough to submit to AppImage Hub.