How to restore a Jolla 1 while in the American Midwest?

answered 2019-05-27 17:51:55 +0200

DrYak
9624 ●93 ●134 ●128

http://www.sympato.ch/

updated 2019-05-28 19:00:32 +0200

Yellow light means power-up failure. (The USB port itself works as it should).

The smartphone cannot function on pure USB power only. In order to negociate the USB power (detect the type of charger and optionnally ask for the required amperage if it's needed by the charger - laptop provide 100mAh by default an need a handshake to provide 500mAh), it needs to be booted up (even if only in charging mode aka "playdead", not booting full OS) but it needs a battery in order to boot up. There's a catch-22: the Jolla 1's board needs a battery in order to reach the state when it can get enough power from the USB to not require a battery - the board will shine yellow if that powering sequence fails.

1. Check the battery. Is it charged? Does it holds charge if charged by a dedicated universal lithium battery charger?

   (the kind of universal charger that one can buy for charging point-and-shoot cameras' battery: this kind of stuff, except maybe try to buy it from a local US shop that has controlled the quality before importing, instead of random chinese e-shop seller. If you go for the e-shop seller option Amazon might have such models too. DO NOT LEAVE THE BATTERY UN-ATTENDED while attempting to charge a dead battery. If it gets damaged, you'd want to shut down quickly before the a big fire starts. Also MIND THE POLARITY, TOO. It's another explosion-inducing mistake)

   The Jolla is an old phone and by now it might that the battery is simply dead (JuBaTec sells replacements whose built-in BMS supports the correct protocol to report temperature to the phone. Avoid if possible repurposing actually HTC batteries, the Jolla is unable to ask temperature out of those).

2. Check that the battery and smartphone are making good contact.

   The springy pings on the Jolla 1 are kind of crappy. There are tons of question on this forum from other people about the subject (my solution was to pass a small bit of an elastic band behind the broken springy pin. The elasticness of the band bit restores just enough springiness to make the pin work)

   Check the contacts too against corrosion. Such an old batterys has probably the + and - contacts a bit corroded, and the pins might be a bit too. This got mentionned a lot on the forum back then too. (Pay ATTENTION NOT TO SHORT + and - terminals while cleaning up or specially while trying the "conductive grease" trick that some old posts mention. Otherwise it will definitely explode. Also be carefull with the pins, they can easily break, other wise look at the above tip)

3. Once the above two points are solved, if the phone still doesn't boot (though the color won't be yellow anymore), try to see if you can boot it into recovery mode and if you can telnet to the menu. (See link provided by Edz)

   Do not under any circumstance attempt to repair the BTRFS filesystem. (Though for once, that warning doesn't cause explosions, unlike the above two points). The recovery menu does it wrong. (It will mostly only succeed at corrupting it further. If the filesystem cannot be mounted, try DD dumping it to an SD card and running "btrfs restore" from a Linux laptop)

   You might try to attempt a factory reset under the recovery menu.

   You might also try to flash a newer image by some other community users, if you do not want to reset to an extremely old image and/or the file-system got corrupted.