Cannot access Service Menu for FairPhone 4

/e/OS Devices Fairphone
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1

Dear /e/OS Foundation & Community,
Very recently I bought a FairPhone 4 and I’ve installed /e/OS on it. I’m using it from some months and in general I like the OS very much. Nevertheless, unfortunately, I have problems with my microphone and when I call somebody they cannot hear me well due to noise. I also checked that the noise is recorded when I use the recording app.
I think the problem is the hardware so I’ve contacted the FairPhone people and they have asked me to enter into the Service Menu to check the health of the 3 microphones by dialling the following code from Phone app:

*#*#2886#*#*

Unfortunately it seems that the Service Menu is not accessible in this way on /e/OS. How can I do to to execute the test they are asking me to?
Any help is very much appreciated.
Best,
Gio

2

Unfortunately they might ask you to re-install Fairphone OS for that purpose. The Service Menu is only accessible within Fairphone OS.

There is an old FP2 app called “(Fairphone) Checkup” with a much more limited range of tests available on F-Droid and it mostly works on other phones than the FP2 as well, but I doubt that Fairphone Support will accept it for diagnosis on an FP4 (e.g. Checkup only includes tests for 2 microphones).

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3

Thank you very much @urs_lesse.
By the way do you know if there is some documentation to painlessly re-install Fairphone OS on my phone and especially re-install /e/OS once that I solved the microphone problem? I would like to not loose all the configuration work I did on my phone.
Thanks!

4
  • First copy the accessible “internal storage” content to your Computer,
  • Take a backup of the rest of the device using TWRP to be abble to restore its curent state.
  • install the “Gogol/Fairphone OS” using fastboot
  • make your “hardware test”
  • restore your /e/Fairphone as it was using TWRP
5

To do anything with TWRP here, the bootloader needs to be unlocked. If it is locked now, which it most probably is on a Fairphone 4, unlocking it would force a factory reset for security reasons.

And as of now TWRP for the Fairphone 4 doesn’t support decrypting user data yet, so meaningful backup capabilities would be very limited even with an already unlocked bootloader … https://forum.fairphone.com/t/twrp-for-fairphone-4/79634

Not gonna happen, sorry to say.
Backup as much as you can and take notes of settings which you want to remember.

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