Cannot start the device anymore (or screen remains blank) -- any ideas?

/e/OS Devices Gigaset
1

This morning, my GS 290 decided to pose the ultimate challenge: I cannot turn it on. Pressing the power button with varied length does not help. One time, I could see that the phone made a connection with my local wifi, so it even seems that it does boot, but does not turn on the screen. That would cohere with a previous bug I have reported in that forum, where the phone does not turn on the screen by incoming calls with the in-built dialing app. But now I’m at a loss: I cannot take out the battery, since it’s hard wired, and pressing the power button doesn’t change anything anymore.

Any ideas what I could do just to START that thing?

Note: I am still at 0.15, which ran w/o problems (apart from the problem of the incoming calls).

2

If you can manage to go to recovery using physical keys, you can try to connect from a computer using adb, then scrcpy (I assume TWRP is installed on your device).

3

Just to add to what @smu44 has said, can you consider whether the phone is actually on with a black screen?

I hear you saying there is no response to the power button, but if you try to navigate to to bootloader in a darkened room, do you ever see a change from black off screen, and a black but on screen?

I wrote to Gigaset and they confirmed that there is no soft reset option, so I feel you have to regard the phone as fragile when in an unusable state.

4

Thanks for the replies! @smu44: What do you mean with “recovery using physical keys”? I understand that if the phone is on, I could try to connect it from my computer. But it does not seem to be on. At least as far as I can tell: It’s not connecting to the wifi (anymore).

@aibd I’ll try to press the buttons “in a dark room”, thanks for the hint. If you write that there is no soft reset option, that means what exactly?

Hell, I have arch linux installed on my laptop, so I have some experience of learning about hardware and software, yet I I bought an /e/ phone exactly to not be bothered with all this tech stuff when using a “free” smartphone… seems it did not work out…

5

A phone usually has a soft reset key combination. It would have a similar effect to pulling the battery!

Edit: and of course it would be totally appropriate to report this to support@e.email.

6

Googling for “soft reset gs290”; I can only find instructions which assume one can use the screen, or some scary stuff about resetting it to the factory settings, which would be the last resort. And there are lots of badly translated clickbait sites…

I’ll report it to the support, and I will come back to that thread. But for now, I have to work and can’t waste more time. Thanks for the quick replies. No phone today :expressionless:

7

Just for the record, as it is not easily found in our documentation, you reach bootloader from phone powered off with

  • Hold the Volume Up + Power buttons for a while.
  • When Bootloader Mode appears you can follow on screen instructions to navigate to Recovey Mode or Fastboot Mode.

(For troubleshooting, be sure to press Volume up first, so that you are in no doubt that you called bootloader and not system.)

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8

Short update: Buttons change nothing, cannot enter bootloader or system, wrote to support. Will post again if I can use it again.

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