Infinite boot loop after battery drain

josephkalous

Thought i'd make an account to report the same issue on my Pixel 8a

I just a few minutes ago plugged my phone up after it died, my phone hadnt been updated in probably about 5 days. I plugged it up, I perceived it to be charging, dying on boot due to lack of charge, and repeating a few times, it has done that before. I then let it charge up to 60 percent, and now I'm in the same spot as the author of this post. I havent looked into any of the fixes yet, hoping something works. I will say that I'm able to at least unlock the phone before it freezes up and turns off, or just freezes until i shut it off. It'll unlock and none of the apps or homescreen will display, only the notification bar, I was able to pull down notifications before it died, nothing relevant there.

edit like 2 minutes later: I was able to boot into safe mode, it said update failed an all that but i'm unsure if it is related to the bootloop.

clusterfuff

Just to update my situation - I managed to get just enough charge in it to get through the GrapheneOS boot logo and into the OS - could see 5% charged after leaving it paused at the bootloader. Not sure exactly what helped but it's now resolved. I feel very uneasy that a drained battery could potentially brick the phone!

Fay_Wilmont

Pardo de0u Might the system have locked up and sat there, or maybe crashed into a boot loop, thus running the battery down to zero?

Unfortunately I can't know for sure. What I can certainly tell is that the phone was working perfectly up to that point. For personal matters, the phone was left turned on and unused for more than a week, after which it never completed to boot GrapheneOS.

I noticed the default setting on GrapheneOS is for it to reboot automatically when it hasn't been unlocked in the last 18 hours. So chances are the phone got stuck in the current bootloop before the battery was drained.

Pardo

Fay_Wilmont I noticed the default setting on GrapheneOS is for it to reboot automatically when it hasn't been unlocked in the last 18 hours. So chances are the phone got stuck in the current bootloop before the battery was drained.

Could be the case, not 100% sure though.

stfnh

Ran into this same issue yesterday on a Pixel 8 after the battery discharged to 0%. Here is my fix, hope it helps:

Plug in phone to charge
Shutoff phone
Turn on phone
Pause boot at alternate os warning screen by tapping the power button and wait 10-15 minutes.
Resume boot by tapping the power button.
On the Google logo hold volume down, keep holding for about a minute into the GrapheneOS logo. Wait for it to enter safe mode.
Unlock and in settings check for updates, install them, and wait until verification completes.
Reboot phone, repeat steps 3 through 5.
Wait for it to say update applied.
Reboot phone

Should boot regularly.

Only oddities I noticed so far are my contacts were erased and a home screen widget was removed.

Pardo

stfnh Plug in phone to charge
Shutoff phone
Turn on phone
Pause boot at alternate os warning screen by tapping the power button and wait 10-15 minutes.
Resume boot by tapping the power button.
On the Google logo hold volume down, keep holding for about a minute into the GrapheneOS logo. Wait for it to enter safe mode.

The issue is that I do not enter safe mode or any other. Much as I try any combination of steps the GrapheneOS logo freezes and restarts.

rylabs

stfnh Ran into this same issue yesterday on a Pixel 8 after the battery discharged to 0%. Here is my fix, hope it helps:

Plug in phone to charge
Shutoff phone
Turn on phone
Pause boot at alternate os warning screen by tapping the power button and wait 10-15 minutes.
Resume boot by tapping the power button.
On the Google logo hold volume down, keep holding for about a minute into the GrapheneOS logo. Wait for it to enter safe mode.
Unlock and in settings check for updates, install them, and wait until verification completes.
Reboot phone, repeat steps 3 through 5.
Wait for it to say update applied.
Reboot phone

Should boot regularly.

Only oddities I noticed so far are my contacts were erased and a home screen widget was removed.

Thanks for this. Ran into exactly this issue this morning on a Pixel 9, and this worked on the first run. Just one boot into safe mode boot to let the failed update restart, and then all good on the next boot into normal mode

Wrangle6600

stfnh This was a solution for me.

Matze Might also be a solution, your mileage may vary.

Phone discharged to 0%, boot looping infinitely as others have described.
There was a failed update.

I have now enabled some settings in the update menu around only downloading updates while charging to hopefully avoid a repeat incident.

I'll post the log here and in a github issue if I can find one.

Fay_Wilmont

Pardo From all the bootloop issues I've looked at so far, it seems yours is unique (despite people claiming to have the same issue) in that charging your phone first didn't help (most issues seem to be caused by an empty battery), you can't enter safe mode and—most importantly—a factory reset and sideloading OTAs doesn't fix it.

Just wanted to state that, sadly I have nothing to add... you might just be out of luck on this one.

Pardo

Fay_Wilmont

Thanks a lot for your interest! I'm afraid you are right. I was waiting to see if any GOS dev could suggest any idea, but I think this phone has gone bricked.

de0u

Pardo If you do obtain a developer opinion that the device can't be rescued (maybe wait another day or two?), and if the value of the data on the device is genuinely large, you might try a forensic recovery service. That would probably involve multiple hundreds of dollars to try, with no certainty of success.

other8026

Pardo I'm not one of the developers, but there don't seem to be any options left at this point. When people run into these sorts of rare issues where their devices don't boot up all the way, they can usually be fixed by sideloading or by factory resetting.

Outside of known bugs or hardware failure, I've never heard of this kind of thing happening. Otherwise, factory resets and/or sideloading always fix these kinds of problems. The only real remaining likely possibility is hardware failure. Very unlikely and probably not possible to reproduce or troubleshoot or fix would be some insanely rare bug in AOSP where a device is bricked by dying while in the middle of an update. Updating is very safe and you can see that even other people who've had their devices die during updates can get back up and running again.

Again, I want to make very, very clear I'm not one of the developers, but I don't think there's anything that can be done at this point.

lost_cause

I can only relate personal experience but I had a 8a that went into bootloop with GrapheneOS and it turned out to be a hardware failure. Eventually it wouldn't boot up whatsoever.

I had it repaired under warranty.

The failure started off as intermittent rebooting and progressed from there. I'm not so sure your issue is related to the battery drain.

Pardo

lost_cause
Sounds very similar. Was the repair an official one? Any issues because of having GOS?

lost_cause

Pardo

The repair was at a local shop that was certified to do warranty work. At the time of repair it wouldn't even power on so they never saw GrapheneOS. I don't think it would have been a problem. They flashed stock OS back on it anyway.

Pardo

Thank you all for your help, I am assuming it might be a hardware failure.

Fay_Wilmont

lost_cause

Was the bootloader locked and OEM unlocking disabled on your 8a? I wonder how they can flash the stock firmware in that case. Can repair shops do this? If so, how?

Otherwise, was the device really repaired or did they just give you a different phone?

zora

I hit the same issue with Pixel 8a. My phone did got stuck on the Graphene OS logo and then it rebooted.

Using this trick worked for me:

press the lock button when you see the warning about loading a different OS to pause startup. Make sure the device is plugged in and leave it for at least 15–20 minutes

lost_cause

Fay_Wilmont It was definitely repaired. This particular phone was green. At first I got a call saying he would have to order the part after trying replacing the battery. Then I was called back a few hours later saying he found 1 part in stock. He called it "the motherboard".

I don't necessarily think the firmware was flashed but the components were replaced with stock components and stock firmware.

de0u

lost_cause I believe a phone motherboard swap includes the CPU, GPU, DRAM, and flash storage. If the flash storage is replaced, it will likely contain the stock OS.

maricn

Hi all, I have an interesting case too.

Left my Pixel 6 Pro (raven) at low but not super low battery, came back to it soon, it was off.

Plugged it into a very low voltage charger and went to do smt else counting on the charging needs time with that charger.

Came back to it, turned it on, it rebooted. I was like strange, it was charging pretty long, but whatever.

I go to other room, plug it into the 90W PD charger and then i actually notice it's boot looping.

So after 15 or so unsuccessful attempts to get it to boot, i tried a new thing:

Plug in to charge
Wait until Grapheneos logo appears
Let it for 3-5 seconds
Plug out the cable
Wait for the logo to disappear (this is where the phone booted into the os for me)
Plug back the cable QUICKLY before the reboot
I also turned off the screen just in case and left it for a minute before unlocking it

I'm writing you right now from this state. The battery was at 0% for 10 minutes until it started coming up. Uptime 34 mins - 10% right now. I'm afraid to plug out the cable.

Another interesting thing is that in "About phone" - "Battery information" it says "Cycle count" is 0. That wasn't like that before definitely!

Any ideas, can i contribute somehow, lmk.

maricn

maricn
ok i got the courage to reboot and now the Cycle Count shows as 818, which is more like it.. The battery is at 100% and I haven't noticed any other issues yet.

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