Small concern

epic_gos_user

About 6 hours ago I shut down my phone as it was quite low on battery and I wanted to save it until the end of the day. So today I came home, turned it on, and there was a red error message: "No valid operating system was found. The device will not boot." The power button on the side had the label "Press to power off" (not "press to continue"). On the bottom it also said ID: 216f52 (or something like that, it was 6 hex letters) and CODE: 5. I powered it off and powered it on again, same error.

However, when I went over to get a different device to take a picture of it, the phone powered off automatically (because it was on the screen for too long). Turning it on again, the error was gone, there was only the usual "your device is loading a different operating system". Device appears to work fine now.

Is this normal? Is it expected? Did my phone become a rusty car that I have to hit a couple of times before it starts? Or is this just a weird obscure one in a million android bug that nobody will ever fix?

epic_gos_user

Also after a bit of searching I found a similar issue to do with A/B updating. But the last update was installed yesterday and it was successful - I've been on 20231107 the whole of today, and the phone booted to it as well. There wasn't any rollback. For no apparent reason it refused to boot twice, then booted fine after 30 seconds.

I'm worried that it might start failing more, since I have never seen this type of failure before. I do have backups just in case (not with Seedvault - just good old Syncthing), but I don't know if I would feel comfortable installing GrapheneOS again if it fails like this and refuses to boot at all.

other8026

epic_gos_user this seems to be an upstream problem: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/277984765. While this kind of behavior might indicate a hardware problem under normal circumstances, at this point it's hard to tell. As you've already found, many other people have this same issue.

Of course it's up to you to decide whether you want to keep your device up to date, but keeping things up to date is always considered best practice.

epic_gos_user

The update succeeded tho. I was on the latest version before I turned the phone off. Then it failed to boot. Then it booted back into the latest version.

This is what is concerning me - from my perspective it just spontaneously failed to boot twice in a row, without anything that could potentially be reason for it to fail to boot.

Maybe it is a hardware problem, but this phone has had zero hardware issues for almost a year now. My Pixel 6 apparently had a hardware issue (all sensors failed, no accelerometer, no ambient light, no proximity sensor), so unless Google has extremely poor hardware quality I doubt I'd be unlucky enough to have hardware issues for 2 generations in a row... right?

GrouchyGrape

I had the same error shortly after one of the October updates (don't remember which one). I have not seen it before then or since. It was a bit concerning the first time, but so far everything is stable and I'm leaning more toward the upstream bug. Definitely worth keeping an eye on it.

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GrouchyGrape
Same here. P7. It happend only one time. Everything else works as intended.