The joys of restarting......

MrT10001 · 13 Oct 2023, 13:57

As the title says, this tablet is a joy to restart if the battery happens to run flat. This is an unfortunate bug that has been well documented, but I thought it would be prudent to start a thread where we could post our experiences and things that worked to get back our beloved Ubuntu Touch...

This stems from one of my X605's (I have four...) tablets with a full charge deciding to switch off and not restart to UT at all. So here goes things that work or don't work:

boot into fastboot mode (switch device off, wait 30 seconds, then press power and volume down and you see tiny red writing in a corner saying fastboot mode when the device boots). Plug the device into a PC and in a fastboot shell run the command fastboot continue.
Boot into recovery mode (power of the tablet, wait 30 seconds, hold volume up+volume down+power on together. When the device powers on, release the power button, keeping the volume buttons pressed until you enter UT recovery). In recovery mode, reboot the tablet.
Boot into recovery mode. In recovery mode, reboot into recovery mode, then restart the tablet.
Boot into recovery mode, mount the system, reboot into recovery, then reboot the tablet.
Re-install using the UT installer leaving Wipe Data unticked.

If none of the above work, have a cup of tea, coffee, vodka (whatever your tipple is)and leave it for an hour to calm down.

Now the data destructive methods......

Re-install using the ticking "Wipe data".
Enter recovery and factory reset, then reboot..

At this point I gave up, booted to recovery, to then be greeted by the UT splash screen and UT set up.. :anguished_face: :anguished_face: :anguished_face:

My final thing was going to be:

Use the Lenovo Rescue and Smart (dumb) Assistant and reinstall Android, then try again.

I think these tablets must have slight hardware variations, it component revisions (I have seen this a lot on phones) which apart from the bootloader makes some devices annoyingly difficult to get going again.

(BTW, 1 is back on Android, 2 are absolutely fine rebooting and the above description relates to the fourth tablet).

muskist · 15 Oct 2023, 09:59

I'm currently running the boot.img from 16.04 ("xenial") OTA 25 (the last one) and the ubuntu.img #966308062 from https://gitlab.com/ubports/porting/community-ports/android9/lenovo-tab-m10-fhd/lenovo-x605/-/pipelines.

Both my 4-GB and my 2-GB devices are restarting reliably with this combination of images. In the rare case they don't I use MrT10001's above trick #4.

However I just found the above ubuntu.img no more available. Maybe the latest (#1013489143) will do as well.

Anyway, booting this device remains a mystery... :face_with_raised_eyebrow: But once it's up it's a great device!