Sunday, I started having a problem where my phone (AT&T Galaxy Note 2) would bring itself out of the lock screen without me touching anything. The screen will stay on for 10-15 seconds and then shut off again. It will then stay off anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes.
Very odd, right? I figured I downloaded a bad app that was causing the issue. I removed practically every app I could (I wasn't going to go through all of them to see which had permissions to bring the phone out of standby). It still kept doing the same thing.
So I did a hard reset on the phone. That should clear everything, right? The problem still kept happening.
I start thinking maybe it's a hardware issue... EXCEPT for it doesn't happen when the phone is in Airplane Mode! Which brings me back around to thinking it's some rogue app, but it still happens even when there's nothing but the default software installed from after a hard reset. It can't be the power button or a bad proximity sensor if it doesn't happen in Airplane Mode, right?
So I took it to the AT&T store and I didn't expect much. The one guy tried to play with my settings and didn't find anything wrong. He took it to the manager in the back room and the manager said I should do a hard reset (ignoring the fact that I told his employee I already had done so twice).
I've looked for answers online. The ones I've found I've tried. I've removed all applications. I've changed the screen time outs. I've even downloaded a Lock Screen replacement program. I've tried using anti-virus to scan for problems. It starts to happen again immediately after I perform the hard reset. I've moved the brightness settings. I've removed the S-Pen thinking it might be causing issues. I've turned on and off motion options. I've turned on and off wi-fi, GPS, screen rotation, multi-window, etc. Power Saving mode doesn't help. Blocking Mode doesn't help. The only thing that works is Airplane Mode.
I have NOT tried rooting my phone. I'm scared to do so, even though I'm a UNIX admin and a techie and shouldn't be scared of something like this.
Has anyone ever experienced this? I'm running whatever the normal, latest AT&T android version (4.1.2) for the Note 2. This is killing my battery and reducing screen life (is that a big deal though? I don't know).
Related
So here's a peculiar incident:
I have a CDMA TP with a stock ROM and a few basic apps I gathered from these forums and others. I've had it for less than a week.
Tonite, I went to check my text messages. Suddenly, the screen went black and the phone stopped responding. After pressing the power button and fiddling with the keys, I pulled out the stylus and did a soft reset. No response. Confused by this, I tried again, but still nothing. I removed the battery, and turned the phone back on. It froze at the "Touch Pro" screen with the rom/radio/etc info at the bottom. After repeating this a few times I decided to do a hard reset. So, I turn the device on and perform the hard reset. By this point the TP is only turning on SOME TIMES, and I have to take the battery out and put it back in often just to get it to start successfully. So, I finally get the device to boot up and it starts to configure WinMo. Suddenly, while configuring, it freezes. Now I try to turn it back on, and nothing happens.
Basically the device is stuck like this, shifting between not turning on at all and turning on but freezing at the "Touch Pro" screen.
So, my question is, what the heck is going on here? Has anyone else had this problem, or does this sound familiar to anyone? Any help would be greatly, greatly appreciated.
p.s. Yes, the battery is fully charged.
kameisama said:
So here's a peculiar incident:
I have a CDMA TP with a stock ROM and a few basic apps I gathered from these forums and others. I've had it for less than a week.
Tonite, I went to check my text messages. Suddenly, the screen went black and the phone stopped responding. After pressing the power button and fiddling with the keys, I pulled out the stylus and did a soft reset. No response. Confused by this, I tried again, but still nothing. I removed the battery, and turned the phone back on. It froze at the "Touch Pro" screen with the rom/radio/etc info at the bottom. After repeating this a few times I decided to do a hard reset. So, I turn the device on and perform the hard reset. By this point the TP is only turning on SOME TIMES, and I have to take the battery out and put it back in often just to get it to start successfully. So, I finally get the device to boot up and it starts to configure WinMo. Suddenly, while configuring, it freezes. Now I try to turn it back on, and nothing happens.
Basically the device is stuck like this, shifting between not turning on at all and turning on but freezing at the "Touch Pro" screen.
So, my question is, what the heck is going on here? Has anyone else had this problem, or does this sound familiar to anyone? Any help would be greatly, greatly appreciated.
p.s. Yes, the battery is fully charged.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Time to take it in and get a new one.....
Same problem here phone started b not coming out of lock mode. Backlight is on but no display on screen (if i tilt the screen left and right i can see light coming from behind) did about 6 hard resets and still same problem. also power button works whenever it wants to. this phone sucks @ss, i want my mogul back. on a second note my replacement will be here on wednesday.
Touch Pro stock rom purchased back in nov when it came out
yeah, i've had the same problem, i found if i hit my phone on the back or side and then batter pull and hit the soft reset while off, not the power button to turn it back on, it comes back on with color on the screen not just blank black screen with backlight, this works mostly every time, but when it doesn't, i just hold the power button down and do battery pull and hit the power button and it works, its like its got a combo of things you have to do before it works.. weird
Boot Up
I have also had similar problems. I for some reason sometimes have to remove my SD card and boot up without it for some reason. Not all the time, but every once in a blue moon. Not too sure how that affects anything, but you may try that too.
well i started a thread here ***help*** because i kinda have the same problem.
i downloaded some cabs, nothing fancy but i had some problems with a theme i downloaded. when i went to deleted i couldnt..... to make a story short, i took it to the sprint store where they tried to do a master reset/ hard reset and it wont take it. it wont do a thing... they say some important files are missing...
the phone works but not the way it should... the time on the home screen wont show up. and some other small things...
dont know how this happened but i would like to know... im worried about new programs to the phone now. ( getting a new one)
still want to see if i can fix this one.
Mayonesa said:
well i started a thread here ***help*** because i kinda have the same problem.
i downloaded some cabs, nothing fancy but i had some problems with a theme i downloaded. when i went to deleted i couldnt..... to make a story short, i took it to the sprint store where they tried to do a master reset/ hard reset and it wont take it. it wont do a thing... they say some important files are missing...
the phone works but not the way it should... the time on the home screen wont show up. and some other small things...
dont know how this happened but i would like to know... im worried about new programs to the phone now. ( getting a new one)
still want to see if i can fix this one.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Have you tried re flashing the ROM?
it wasnt HTC's fault for your phone's not booting...thats what happens when u try to mess with the hardware too much and you dont know what your doing
Would you want to sell???
Reboot Brick HTC process
****DOn't take battery out after hard boot***
1.just watch videohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sk56olMkCtU and do what they do but dont take battery out. LEAVE phone STUCK on BOOT screen. Nothign else will move or work but you want phone just like that.
2. connect usb cable to active sync. (this may not link up but leave usb connected anyhow) Do not delete phone profile.
3.use rom like Download MightyROM6_Herman.exe avail at: http://www.lilrico.com/Mighty/mightyromblog/?p=454
4 although active sync is still attatched but may not be connecting. It will connect thru usb anyway when you run the rom software. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fV2I2WAFkg4&NR=1
This worked and kept phone from cutting on and off. and restored ROM. don't know about original htc boot. but your phone will work under this rom for now and you can go from there.
hey thanks plain ole dumb, it works now.
man I thought it was over.
thanks again
Ok, so I have a rooted Vibrant on stock firmware and I've been having a problem with my screen becoming unresponsive. It originally happened on a smaller level when the phone was newer and unrooted, however the problem has gotten much worse. I've done a factory reset of the phone along with a nandroid backup of it before the problem was severe, yet it comes back just as strong.
I already went through the problems with the no wake from setcpu, even thought it was my lock screen becoming unresponsive until I disabled it with NoLock. Also, I have the Logcat live wallpaper, and usually when you tap the screen, you can see the system processing the information, however when the problem occurs there is no response on the logcat live wallpaper. The phone doesn't freeze at all though. All the soft keys still work perfect as do the volume and power buttons.
Any ideas, tips, suggestions that might help me narrow down this problem? Could it be from a bad version of busybox? Autokiller maybe? I have it set to strict(was previously on aggressive) but no change. Maybe Autostarts is causing something to freeze up. Thanks for any help. Seams like these phones have alot of wake up issues.
I would reflash back to stock with Odin and see what happens when you don't have task killer, set CPU, etc. Also, be careful with autostarts
So I removed Autostarts and rebooted, same deal. I did a factory reset and still the same. I just unrooted a few minutes ago and the problem seams to have gone away. I'm gonna leave it like this for a bit without installing any apps and see what happens. Is it possoble I have a bad root.zip file or bad version of busybox? Doesn't make sense to happen when I have root, then go away when I don't. Any reason it could cause this? I'm really close to sending the phone back, but don't want to waste my time if it's just a bad root file or user error.
Well I don't know for a fact, hopefully someone more knowledgeable can chime in. Maybe when you are unrooted, changes made by autostarts no longer have the permissions to affect anything. Personally I would use Odin (have done it twice already) and start from scratch. But then you risk accidentally screwing up the phone if something goes wrong.
I removed Autostarts and rebooted just to make sure the changes took effect though. Even did a factory reset. Those removed all apps that required root access and the problem was still so bad it took me an hour to get the screen responsive again. Once I did get into my phone I booted into recover and unrooted. Restared the phone and now the issue seams to have gone away. Touch screen is very responsive now which leads me to believe it was something that had to do with the root file i'm flashing, or possibly busybox. Very very strange.
Hopefully someone much smarter than me could give some insight as to what could potentially cause the touch screens to just stop recieving signal. It's just bizarre that the phone continues to run fine, just not the screen.
Last night I was reading Twitter before going to bed when I noticed that my GPS kept ticking on and off after I'd posted an update (I let my Twitter app access GPS to assign my location to tweets). Thinking that odd, I rebooted.
Talk about the reboot from hell.
Approximately 30 seconds after booting back up, the phone locked: I could tap buttons and feel haptic feedback, but no changes to the screen occurred. I eventually got the bright idea to lock it and unlock it; pressing the lock key blacked the screen, but pressing it again did not bring the screen back. Scared, I eventually pulled the battery and started up again.
It happened again. And again. In the midst of all this, I slowly learned a few things: it wasn't tied to any of the new apps I'd installed (I had enough "functional time" each boot to uninstall a couple of things), it wasn't tied to internet connectivity or GPS (I had time to turn both off), and the SGS3 has a dev option to monitor CPU usage of various apps/threads. That little HUD, which overlayed everything else, would remain updating through a lockup, and I found that a process named "df" was starting up and immediately sucking up the entire CPU and not letting go.
I eventually found that it worked the processor so hard that the phone would overheat if left alone and "soft reboot" (OS restarts, but no Verizon/Samsung loading screens), so I was able to at least stop pulling the battery!
Finally, I turned it off and let it cool down for a few hours whilst Googling: no results anywhere for a similar problem or regarding the "df" process. Turning the phone back on after its reset didn't help at all. The lockup time was so quick that I couldn't even initiate a factory reset--it would lock up in the midst of preparing to perform it!
I eventually restarted it into the bootloader (meant to go for recovery, oops) to poke around and got a really scary image: a "Custom" screen before the bootloader starts that the devs are saying means that system apps/files have been modified. Now, since I don't have root yet (no hacking/voiding warranty JUST yet), I am not ABLE to modify system apps, which means that something got tweaked all by its lonesome, and THAT isn't supposed to happen. It was probably what was causing the lock, though--some driver somewhere that's supposed to say "Processor, don't try to calculate pi to infinity" got hosed or whatever.
I eventually got into stock recovery and was able to initiate the factory reset from there without the use of the actual OS (thus avoiding the hard lock). The phone rebooted fine, let me sign into Google, and spent the rest of the night redownloading apps. It's fine now.
EXTREMELY worrisome. Possibly a hardware fault with the EMMC chips holding my OS or something--there's not a lot that can knock out system files on a non-rooted device. At least it doesn't appear common, insofar as all my Googling leads to no results at all.
Any ideas as to what the heck happened?
Apologies in advance for the potentially vague description, but I also cannot find a solution elsewhere on the forum.
Earlier today, I was watching a YouTube video and then I locked my phone and left it to charge whilst I went downstairs (as I often do). When I returned roughly an hour later, I found the screen on, which I only ever do if I've left Draw Something open, or some similar app - but it was on the lock screen.
(none of that is necessarily important, I just wanted to clear up the "what did you do to make it start rebooting" question)
Anyway, after unlocking the phone, the screen went to black and the phone restarted.
However, it wasn't a "real" reboot, because the boot screen didn't come up, etc. It's just like just the UI is restarted. I can usually use the phone for about 30 seconds at a time. This seems extended when I have flight mode on, and is even longer still when I have the phone locked.
I've uninstalled some potentially-offending apps, removed the SD card, cleared some apps' data, but to no avail.
I'm using default 4.0.4 from Samsung. The only issues I'd had with it until now were that some apps crashed occasionally, but I attributed that mainly to the apps themselves.
The most annoying thing for me is that is seems like it's an issue that can be fixed quite simply, without having to uninstall every app or factory reset the phone.
Anyone have any other ideas as to what I could do? Thanks!
RobHannay said:
Apologies in advance for the potentially vague description, but I also cannot find a solution elsewhere on the forum.
Earlier today, I was watching a YouTube video and then I locked my phone and left it to charge whilst I went downstairs (as I often do). When I returned roughly an hour later, I found the screen on, which I only ever do if I've left Draw Something open, or some similar app - but it was on the lock screen.
(none of that is necessarily important, I just wanted to clear up the "what did you do to make it start rebooting" question)
Anyway, after unlocking the phone, the screen went to black and the phone restarted.
However, it wasn't a "real" reboot, because the boot screen didn't come up, etc. It's just like just the UI is restarted. I can usually use the phone for about 30 seconds at a time. This seems extended when I have flight mode on, and is even longer still when I have the phone locked.
I've uninstalled some potentially-offending apps, removed the SD card, cleared some apps' data, but to no avail.
I'm using default 4.0.4 from Samsung. The only issues I'd had with it until now were that some apps crashed occasionally, but I attributed that mainly to the apps themselves.
The most annoying thing for me is that is seems like it's an issue that can be fixed quite simply, without having to uninstall every app or factory reset the phone.
Anyone have any other ideas as to what I could do? Thanks!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
just go to recovery mode and fix permissions
I've noticed over the past 2 weeks or so that all of a sudden the phone sometimes doesn't bother with the lock screen. I'll double tap to wake and it'll go right to the home screen (or to whatever app I was in last). This happens with or without notifications. I thought it was something caused by Evolve because it seemed to stop once I cleared data/froze it with Titanium but it's started back up again.
Running Android M, rooted, with Xposed. However, I have not installed any new modules or done any system updates during this time. All of the phone settings look correct, and are unchanged, and there isn't a setting for 'skip the lockscreen like 30% of the time' anyway.
Anyone have any ideas? Could it be an app causing this? I believe those are the only things that have been updated.
Something like Greenify?
Any ideas on where to start troubleshooting would help. Thanks.
Still fighting with this. Anyone else? Removed everything I could find that wasn't being used. Wiped data for lockscreen settings. Wiped cache/dalvik. At a loss here. It's really annoying!
Only thing I can think of is that Power Key Instantly Locks is turned off.
jbimmer said:
Only thing I can think of is that Power Key Instantly Locks is turned off.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
it's on, and lock timer is set to immediately.
doesn't seem to have any relation to time. sometimes I'll pick the phone up after an hour and it'll go right in without the lock screen.
negativedrew said:
it's on, and lock timer is set to immediately.
doesn't seem to have any relation to time. sometimes I'll pick the phone up after an hour and it'll go right in without the lock screen.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Sorry, I don't have any other ideas. Maybe someone else can be better help.
Still driving me nuts. I thought I had solved it by turning off 'battery optimizations' for anything always-on/lock screen related but that wasn't the answer. Reflashed the rom, still having the issue. Might need to reflash with a full wipe I guess.
I'd rather just move to Nougat but I can't get xposed to work properly. Life is hard haha.
in case anyone finds this thread when dealing with the same issue: Android Wear was the culprit. wakelock detector pointed me in that direction and once i uninstalled it, the problem stopped immediately and has not returned.