Fairphone 3+ can't start the e/OS, because the log file could not be loaded

Good evening,

I was making videos on my Fairphone 3+ and wanted to share multiple videos of the average length of five minutes via WhatsApp at once. The OS hung and stopped to response altogether. Having had rebooted the phone, I found myself in the following situation.

Every time, I unlock the sim card with a pin, I see the message in the background stating: “The memory space is running out. Some system functions only work to a limited extent.” Passing the code to start the operating system, I’m getting the further message of “BlissLauncher doesn’t work” followed by “The log file could not be loaded”. Afterward, the phone reboots itself in the Recovery mode.

Unfortunately, I can’t access the internal storage after unlocking the sim card with the pin. I hit a dead end because the Recover mode only has to offer formatting of the user data, including the internal storage.

Having searched through the forum, I’m following the post “Recover data from corrupt system eos”. There I found the steps to recover the OS with hopefully no data loss. However, there is the problem. I have the last version of e-1.15 on my FP3+ running and there is no recovery-e-1.15-s-20230913330639-stable-avicii.zip in the list to be found.

Trying to use recovery-e-1.14-s-20230816320616-stable-avicii.img ends up in the message of “Signature verification failed Install anyway?” on my phone. After confirmation, I see the following message on the console of my macOS:

adb sideload Downloads/recovery-e-1.14-s-20230816320616-stable-avicii.img
serving: ‘Downloads/recovery-e-1.14-s-20230816320616-stable-avicii.img’ (~0%) adb: failed to read command: Undefined error: 0

The phone jumps back to the recovery mode. Now, I’m asking myself where, and how can I request the file “recovery-e-1.15-s-20230913330639-stable-avicii.zip” to be created and added to the list of images?

Many thanks in advance!
Best greetings from Germany

The link you quote was specifically for avicii a quite different phone !

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Thank you so much for the lightning fast answer! Please post a correct link to the e/OS images for Fairphone 3+. :pray:

avicii is the codename of the OnePlus Nord … https://doc.e.foundation/devices/avicii

The codename of Fairphone 3/3+ would be FP3 (they get the same /e/OS builds).

Let’s start with what exactly you are running currently to establish how to proceed best, please refer to … [HOWTO] Give complete /e/OS version info easily for support, answers, comparison etc

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@AnotherElk, being in the Recovery I see
“Version 1.14 ()
Active slot: a”

Furthermore, I found Advanced → View recovery logs → /tmp/recovery.log. In this file, I found the entry
[0.957211] ro.lineage.version=1.14-s-20230815320616-stable-FP3

Sorry that it took me so long to figure it out :cry:

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I found the correct image in the list of images for FP3, and tried to run adb sideload Downloads/IMG-e-1.14-s-20230815320616-stable-FP3.zip. Nonetheless, it ended up in the following error message on the screen of my phone:
Installing update…
E: Failed to find update binary META-INF/com/google/android/update-binary

:thinking: I wonder if there is a specific recovery image necessary…

if you have beginner cli skills, you can recover in-place - see this thread and subthreads: Fairphone shuts down after entering pin and goes into recovery mode

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Those “IMG-…” image files are not suited for ADB sideload, they get flashed with fastboot.
If you want to use ADB sideload, you will find the link to the necessary OTA file in this case (stable) in https://ota.ecloud.global/api/v1/FP3/stable (see the “url:” lines).

I had been leaving others to answer as they actually have Fairphone experience (not me); we can imagine it is a difficult position you are in. I just feel involved as you linked my post !

You don’t need a recovery image, you report your recovery working ok.

Not vital (I think) but it is probably worth telling us if your phone was locked after /e/ was installed.

So I think we can say that you previously had
1.14-s-20230815320616-stable-FP3 so your phone is expected to be running
1.15-s-------------------------stable-FP3 – please shout if this is wrong !

You “base” page for FP3 is https://doc.e.foundation/devices/FP3
You reported you found https://images.ecloud.global/stable/FP3/ – but Fairphone is different from many devices – sideload does not work with this family of images.

@AnotherElk provided a “secret” link which included a .zip image which can be sideloaded https://ota.ecloud.global/builds/full/stable/FP3/e-1.15-s-20230913330639-stable-FP3.zip

I am just putting this in front of you (no instructions or advice !) so you get your bearings.

Significantly why did this happen ? @tcecyk’s thread point to a “lack of space” issue. If this needs fixing, any change of system image may not be the first thing to do.

I would suggest you tell us which bits are clear to you and ask again the best way to proceed.

Good luck

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Thank you kindly for providing the link @tcecyk! However, I’m facing the new issue. Namely, I’m using macOS and not Ubuntu. Thus, I can’t find the alternative of this subfolder under macOS. Nonetheless, I found out that the command
adb shell ‘ls -l /dev/block/bootdevice/by-name/userdata’
produces the output
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 21 1970-08-12 21:44 /dev/block/bootdevice/by-name/userdata → /dev/block/mmcblk0p62.
:thinking: Is there a way for me to mount this subfolder under macOS?

it’s the filesystem on the device, so the host filesystem doesn’t matter. Switch into the context of the device with “adb shell” and think from there - mount it on-device, with on-device commands

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one user noted that by file-group attribution you can deduct the filetype even on encrypted fs’es to nuke them big files - How to mount encrypted /data partition in recovery mode? - #24 by 2t8 - this is useful

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Thanks for the further hint!

I was able to produce the following outputs so far
FP3:/ # ls -lhat /mnt/userdata/media/0/
total 1.1M
drwxrwxr-x 2 media_rw media_rw 4.0K 2023-09-25 23:57 zhUiZLN8hjcsRmj0kOUvfB
drwxrwxr-x 5 media_rw media_rw 4.0K 2023-09-17 17:35 pA4cKEOM7UjAL1yl9GjzZD
drwxrwxr-x 2 media_rw media_rw 4.0K 2023-09-11 16:36 9nQTm+hG7q34DBxtaMehTD
drwxrwxr-x 9 media_rw media_rw 4.0K 2023-08-09 10:21 8LzQIEQmk93wEYbQAVGK2C
drwxrws— 19 media_rw media_rw 4.0K 2023-05-24 20:54 .
drwxrwsr-x 2 media_rw media_rw 4.0K 2023-05-24 20:54 VPWN2WufxDsrkA5vXO2xEB
drwxrwsr-x 4 media_rw media_rw 4.0K 2023-03-21 21:25 mopbeL5Z2Di9EOVYAKhk7D
drwxrwsr-x 2 media_rw media_rw 4.0K 2023-03-21 21:25 Y559Ms3JUysLKXT0sJHn1A
drwxrwxr-x 2 media_rw media_rw 4.0K 2023-03-19 10:31 htWMC2Hq4J,wMrr0SrQz4B
drwxrwxr-x 3 media_rw media_rw 4.0K 2023-02-03 18:35 h3sNDj3NlXU,gV1aYNEDqD
drwxrwxr-x 2 media_rw media_rw 4.0K 2023-01-27 07:23 1ELQAp7nlW3W+1k20fO6lB
drwxrwxr-x 4 media_rw media_rw 4.0K 2022-11-29 20:03 Orm+5uKwRQi4rEb6fPnhbC
drwxrwxr-x 2 media_rw media_rw 4.0K 2022-11-05 21:22 YzV29daKQ,yqTaAe4rawBB
-rw-rw-r-- 1 media_rw media_rw 0.9M 2022-11-03 15:02 8iMJKXHDhEwmULwV+Eq9PGTuCLDB6LFDFvU05C
drwxrws–x 5 media_rw media_rw 4.0K 2022-05-14 07:42 nelx9hM,sz0xcobxP6l6nC
drwxrwxr-x 2 media_rw media_rw 4.0K 2022-05-01 15:31 0A61lXi07qyPLbqOFarP+A
drwxrwxr-x 2 media_rw media_rw 4.0K 2022-04-06 13:29 iHQcnuSQ9xyA5wDcphy3SD
drwxrwxr-x 2 media_rw media_rw 4.0K 2022-04-06 13:29 O9,0vx0esmyL9fQvTi9bCD
drwxrwxr-x 2 media_rw media_rw 4.0K 2022-04-06 13:29 LQX365gr+2I8s8wvIYVQDC
drwxrwx— 4 media_rw media_rw 4.0K 1970-01-29 06:00 …
FP3:/ # du -hs /mnt/userdata/media/0/
37G /mnt/userdata/media/0/

4k is a directory each, use the find commands in the linked threads to find the big files, then one video has to take one for the team and you again have space (for the dalvik cache I think that brings you phone down in scarce times)

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Thanks for your patience with me! I successfully found and deleted some bigger files. Afterward, I was finally able to boot the /e/OS on my phone again!

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:hugs: I can’t thank you enough guys (@tcecyk, @AnotherElk and @aibd) for the lightning quick and on-point answers to all my questions. :pray: I appreciate your patience with beginners the most! :muscle: Thankfully, deleting a few too big files was enough to allow /e/OS to boot again. Having booted the system, I removed even more files from both from my phone and successfully updated the system to e-1.15-…. Afterward, the phone works smoothly again :tada:.

My last question is, if and how can I make sure that all the posts we exchanged won’t disappear from the forum so that the next person having the same/similar issue can actually profit from it?

Thanks again!

P.S.: Do you, by any chance, have suggestions on how to acquire the skill with adb and other tools to become more proficient to deal with any issue better in the future?

I’ve seen this popup 3-4 times now in the forum, it needs a good bugreport.

Low level, tooling for the /e/-recovery should be improved - offering a cli tool for adb to not work in the dark on encrypted files, (see this), but far better yet a real UI option to mount userdata and delete from a filebrowser as twrp can do.

The real solution is Android reserving space aggressively to not be sad when dalvik requests space for its cache. That is what the bugreport should be about, why Android fails the user.

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But where can the ticked be opened so that the developers will actually take notice of the feature request?

A good bugreport would be to look at the forced reboot with adb logcat to see what service bails out. Reproducing this with filling the userdata partition.

Is this error message you saw (in english or german ) ? I’d guess it comes from the DeviceStorageMonitorService.java in updateNotifications but can be wrong if the wording was different.

I think this is not a stockrom issue, or you’d see this more often in Fairphones forum. I wonder if the space scarcity triggers a memory issue, but without a log it’s speculation.

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