There’s an issue with the microphone on my Fairphone 5 but to send it back to be repaired, I need to put Android back on it, removing eOS for now. The phone came from Fairphone so I had to install eOS at the start, which worked fine.
Now I need to go back, but I can’t get my laptop to ‘see’ the phone. Running ‘adb devices’ gives me nothing, and I’m stuck.
The USB cable is a data cable - it works with another Android phone which is ‘seen’ by the laptop when I run ‘adb devices’. USB debugging is enabled, OEM unlocking is enabled.
I followed all the instructions here: https://xdaforums.com/t/guide-linux-installing-adb-and-fastboot-on-linux-device-detection-drivers.3478678/
but this made no difference.
How can I get the Fairphone with eOS to be ‘seen’ by my laptop, which is running Linux Mint 21.3? I also tried on a Mac with the latest OS release, with the same result.
/e/OS is Android, too, but we know what you mean .
Just to make sure, is this a recent statement to you by Fairphone support?
Because Fairphone support can handle /e/OS for a while now with the help of Murena … it would be valuable to know whether they still insist on Fairphone OS when accepting phones for repair.
Primarily you need to get fastboot commands to work with the phone in fastboot mode.
Please check whether fastboot devices works with the phone in fastboot mode.
If you only need ADB working for adb reboot bootloader, then you can achieve the same result by simply rebooting the phone while keeping Vol - pressed until fastboot mode appears.
Else, because not everybody’s aware that there’s a support article detailing what to do …
Thanks for the answer, wasn’t sure how to refer to the different Android versions. Glad you understood me.
On the OS requirement, this was in a response from 13 February:
the warranty only cover the phone if the original OS is installed.
I’ll check though.
fastboot devices doesn’t give me anything.
I can get to the bootloader by holding down the Vol - key, but then the next step in the instructions (I’m following the Fairphone help articles), is to run fastboot flashing unlock, but when I do this I just get . The laptop still doesn’t recognise that the phone is connected.
This is the key issue - I can’t get the phone recognised by the laptop. The cable works with other phones, and I’ve followed the instructions about the developer settings. Is there another setting to change anywhere?
That’s good to know, thanks. So the Fairphone OS requirement still stands for warranty repairs, they just broadened their general support handling to include /e/OS.
I don’t know much about troubleshooting this in Linux or macOS, unfortunately.
As you say the phone doesn’t get recognised, are you only referring to adb devices and fastboot devices not reporting anything back so far, or did you already have a look at different OS places or levels, too?
If until now this is just about ADB and fastboot, you could try to prefix the commands with sudo to run them with administrative rights and see whether that amounts to anything.
Did you check USB debugging set in developer options and mode set to file transfer on the phone when connecting USB? I’ve got hung up by that before, easy to overlook.
Thank you both for the replies. @AnotherElk, what do you mean by ‘different places or levels’? @CraigHB, yes, set to File transfer. Thanks for the suggestion.
There was another thing I got hung up on and that was the fastboot driver. Windows comes with MTP drivers for file transfer (ADB) and Linux probably cans them too, but you need a fastboot driver for fastboot. That messed me up for a bit first time I installed /e/os,
If you look in Windows “device manager” you’ll see the fastboot driver under “other devices” I think it is. If it has a yellow exclamation point you need to correct it. You can just right click on it and select update driver then tell it to search on Windows Update. On Linux you’ll need to find a driver module, but same kind of thing, look for something called Android Fastboot.
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