Librem 5: no sign of life

What are the steps in this context? I’ve only ever used Jumpdrive for reflashing.

P.S. lsusb shows nothing related to the L5 when connected.

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I think you point seven covered and excluded jumpdrive working.

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I had the same thing happen. Here is how I got everything working again.

1.) Take the battery out of the phone.
2.) Plug the power cable in to the phone and boot the phone with no battery in it.
3.) With the phone on and booted up, push the battery in to the phone.
4.) Keep the phone on and the battery in, until the battery is finished charging. This might take a few days.

My problem was that the battery was so dead that it provided a load, not a source of power. It sucks so much power from the wall charger that the phone gets little to no power, not enough to power on. The phone appears to be an intelligent charging manager. But it can’t do anything if it can’t turn on. The battery seems to rely on the phone to manage its charging, otherwise it won’t charge. So which comes first, the chicken or the egg. So try getting the phone to work without the battery in first. I feared that as soon as the battery was pushed in to its cavity, that the phone would die. But in my case, that didn’t happen. That temporary dead state left no lasting damage. It’s been a year now and my L5 still works normally.

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I appreciate the suggestion, but as I wrote:

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Why hold the volume button up or mess with the kill switches. Just remove the battery, plug in the phone to the power brick, and then turn the phone on the usual way using the power-up button. If that gives you a working phone, then force the battery in to its cavity.

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See the first bullet point in my previous comment. (And I did try to power it on at that point.)

The second bullet point procedure was just me following an instruction I saw somewhere in the forum, or in the docs.

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When I had a similar problem, I had turned off the phone using a shutdown command in a terminal window and then let the phone sit unused for a few weeks. That method leaves some things still powered up.

At any rate, if the phone won’t power up, you need either a new power supply, or your phone is broken. The link below goes to a power supply that works well for my Librem 5. Using a known good power supply seems like the next troubleshooting step.

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Thanks. I suppose it could also be a problem with the charging internals.

BTW, since the battery did charge for hours on the last “good” day, I would think the power supply is not likely to be the problem, given that the battery has, or had, enough juice to power on the phone. (But didn’t.)
:man_shrugging:

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Good Luck.

Did you load test the battery charger and the battery (both) to assure that the both are delivering an appropriate amount of current (Amps or mili-amps) in both cases? You need to find out the manufacturers specifications for current requirements in both cases to know if things aren’t working correctly. A voltage test alone can’t tell you much unless the voltage drops to near zero under a reasonable load, which may not happen, even if either the wall power supply or the battery is bad.

You could do a lot of electrical testing (load and voltage drop testing, looking up specifications). But that big charger has been so convenient for me that I bought several of them and gave them out to family members as gifts. They charge anything quickly. No more finding the right charger for the given device and no more long waiting for things to charge.

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Instructions:

In your case, I would assume the LED is not working, but the device itself does.

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@amarok Based on past posts by you it seems that your USB board is bad and probably needs replaced. I had a similar problems on one of mine.

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So, no battery shuffle? Do I start the procedure with the phone connected to the computer already, or before, or after the volume-up-plus-power-button step?

And if it’s successful, what should happen? Do I then see the L5’s file structure in the file manager on the computer, or in the terminal?

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It show up in the terminal, only, after the script executes.

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No need for a battery shuffle. You can connect the Librem 5 at any stage of the procedure, but I personally prefer to do it already connected. If successful, the Jumpdrive script will execute, then the partitions will be mounted in Nautilus. If you are very fortunate, your Librem 5 will also display that Jumpdrive is running and the LED indicates a solid green.

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Failed (if I did it right).

xxx@xxx:~/jumpdrive$ ./boot-purism-librem5.sh
uuu (Universal Update Utility) for nxp imx chips -- libpureos/1.2.91+0git6b465-0pureos+librem5.2-1-g5e5fee8

Success 0    Failure 0                                                         
                                                                                
       1/ 0   [ 
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It looks like the script was trying to execute, but was unable to successfully start. That implies that the Librem 5 is already in flash mode, but the Librem 5 and its LED are not providing any information about its state. While you are waiting for @dos to potentially reply, I suggest emailing Purism support.

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Tried again on a different computer, with a freshly-downloaded Jumpdrive package from Purism:

xxx@xxx:~/purism-librem5$ ./boot-purism-librem5.sh
uuu (Universal Update Utility) for nxp imx chips -- lib1.4.193

Success 0    Failure 0    Wait for Known USB Device Appear...  

Still doesn’t see the L5.

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I sent a repair request to Support today and received an immediate auto-acknowledgment with ticket number. I’ll report here after someone from the team responds.

@JCS , FYI.

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After 13 days of intermittently trying unsuccessfully to turn it on, charge it, and removing/replacing the battery, connecting to outlets, laptops, disengaging killswitches, etc., today, after taking the battery out for a few minutes, then putting it back in, and plugging the included charger into the outlet…

…it finally came back to life.

Charge is starting at 0%.

Gremlins, I guess?

P.S. I still haven’t heard from Support after their initial auto-acknowledgment assigning the ticket number.

P.P.S. Lots of lovely updates were waiting.

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Sounds like the ghosts and ghouls from Halloween had enough fun tormenting your device for now.

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