Phone keeps shutting off

sandfreak

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liquid frozen yogurt 1.9

its just randomly freezing and rebooting now.

i'm wondering if it could be a kernel issue..?
 

furbearingmammal

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Actually, that's very hard on the battery. Only do a power cycle when you start getting shortened battery life. :)

What ROM are you running? Is this a new kernel or one you've used before?

Also, just leave it alone for at least an hour unless you see it rebooting constantly. Otherwise you're taxing the charge system.
 

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Weird. And its ok now??

Sent from my Droid using DroidForums app (free in market)
 

sandfreak

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Actually, that's very hard on the battery. Only do a power cycle when you start getting shortened battery life. :)

What ROM are you running? Is this a new kernel or one you've used before?

Also, just leave it alone for at least an hour unless you see it rebooting constantly. Otherwise you're taxing the charge system.

ok, thats good to know about the battery. thanks.

its a chevy kernel that i've used before, with no problems that i can think of.
 

sandfreak

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Weird. And its ok now??

Sent from my Droid using DroidForums app (free in market)

well right now its frozen in the middle of the boot animation, but the charging light is on so i'm leaving it alone.

edit: i give up, i need to get sleep and i need my phone operational tomorrow so i'm just flashing a nandroid and i'll try again tomorrow. thanks for the help
 
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Se7enLC

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i have it on the charger now and it just keeps rebooting over and over again. it gets to the lock screen and reboots.

i'm assuming all that i can do is just leave it on the charger but it doesnt seem that this is doing any good.

help please :)

edit: the last couple reboots it hasn't even made it to the lock screen. now it freezes during the boot animation and reboots

edit #2: it just rebooted to the lock screen again, without touching the phone i just looked at it and it said battery level is 30% then it immediately rebooted again. and again...it freezes in the boot animation...

Short version: Plug your phone into a USB port (on a computer) and leave it there for like, an hour or two. It'll be good as new again.

Details: The Motorola Droid charging system is very poorly designed for a number of reasons. First, the phone cannot charge while it is off - that means that when you plug it in, it will start to boot - whether or not it has enough charge to boot! Secondly, the phone cannot boot without a battery. If you try to boot without a battery, it will make it partway, then reboot, and cycle. If you try to boot with a dead battery (eg, try to charge a dead battery), it will keep trying to boot over and over again, gradually sucking more and more charge out of the battery until it finally cannot even start to boot.

This is the "Catch-22" of the Droid. To charge the battery, you need to power on the Droid. To power on the Droid, you need a partially-charged battery. There is a little-known fix to this issue. If you plug the Droid into a REAL USB port (like, on a computer, not on a charging brick) when it is off, the Droid will NOT power up like it normally does. Something in the Droid charging system prevents it from powering up when you have a very low battery and are charging via USB. After awhile (30min? 1hr?) the battery will have "enough" power to boot, and it will boot automatically and then continue to charge over USB.

So there are two ways "out" of a situation where your battery is so dead that you can't boot:
1) Plug into USB port and be patient.
2). Get a standalone battery charger and/or spare battery.

There are some skeptics that don't believe me on this one. But try it! Pull the battery out and try to boot off just the charger. It won't boot! USUALLY a dead battery won't get you into this state you're in. When the battery gets so low that it shuts down, it has enough power to boot back up and start charging. But if you were to keep powering it up each time it dies or try to do something in the recovery console when the battery is low, you could easily get it past that point-of-no-return. Flashing a bad kernel or rom that causes boot loops is a pretty easy way to get into this state, since the phone can't charge unless it is booted, it will just keep losing charge while you try to repair it.

I recommend that anybody that plays with ROMs on their droid go to eBay, meritline, or dealextreme right now and purchase a standalone battery charger. They cost like $3 including shipping and might just save your butt sometime (but the USB trick should work, too)
 

furbearingmammal

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Another option involves buying a backup battery and charger. You can get them for like $20 as a set, delivered, sometimes with 2 batteries, not just 1, from eBay and Amazon... And not straight from China like most of the standalones I've seen lately. :D
 
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