Airplane Mode

[TonyLitwiller]

My Droid 3 randomly turned on airplane mode and won't change back. When I go to change it in the settings it says that airplane mode is off, but the little icon appears at the top for airplane mode and I cannot send or receive texts or calls. I have tried taking the battery out and turning it off, nothing seems to work.

 

[-iD]

i had the same thing happen to me twice this weekend. both times on lgb 3.2; first time it was after running with no issues for over a week, second time it was about 6 hours after a fresh (and i mean really fresh) install. both instances seemed to be triggered or immediately preceeded by time in a place where there was no signal present (once in a 2nd floor basement, once deep inside a commercial freezer in a cinderblock building).

at the time got the "no signal" icon, but it never returned to showing a connection after i exited the building. i tried toggling airplane mode to turn it back on, and as you describe, once it showed airplane mode as "on" in a normal fashion, trying to turn airplane mode OFF resulted in the airplane icon staying in the notification bar, the airplane mode control becoming grayed out on the power button menu, and no further combination of battery pulls, reboots, turing on or off other radios, reflashing the radio, flashing a new ROM, or restoring an older known good nandroid (including other ROMS, both GB and froyo) would get my radio to turn back on. no data, no phone, no texts, nothing at all over the vzw network, as if the radio was physically broken or disconnected.

luckily, google is your friend, so i searched. what DID work was to sbf a fresh image, so i reflashed the stock FRG22D sbf file, caught the boot, flashed MC1's root sbf, caught the boot one more time, then flashed CWM and let the boot complete.

if you are following along at home, at this point you should have a working radio again on stock (but rooted) froyo with cwm ready to restore or flash you back to wherever you want to be.

the first time i reflashed lgb 3.2 but it wouldn't complete booting, so i went back to cwm and restored a nandroid of lgb 3.1 then flashed the 3.2 update over it. all appeared to be good but about 6 hours later it went down again in the cooler, and stayed down, exactly the same symptoms.

yesterday i downloaded a slightly newer verion of lgb3.2 from a different source and went through the process again. this time 3.2 flashed and booted flawlessly the first go-round, and so far (knock on wood, balsa, even paper products for good measure) i've had no isses.

if you google "android stuck in airplane mode" you'll see this behaviour has been documented as long ago as early 2010 if not earlier, along with the sbf solution, so while it may have been caused by a bad dl or something in the lgb 3.2 ROM (the first one i'd been using was an RC, the one i'm on now is the final release), it's not something unique to liquid.

wondering what in software or what weird "perfect storm" of circumstances could cause the radio to play dead? weird that whatever it is, it acts like a hardware issue (like your pc if you turn your wireless card off or unplug the cat5) but is corrected by reflashing the sbf.

whatever it is is not in the userspace that can be changed by any normal ROM or nandroid operation. since the areas of the device's flash memory that are only accessed via sbf can't be played with FROM the phone (hence the reason you have to sbf a boot logo, for instance, can't change it from the phone) how could something happen to corrupt a file in that protected area during normal operation?

 

[-iD]

oops, didn't see this was D3 forum

while i suspec the problem and solution are still the same, i'm not sure that a virgin sbf is available for the D3 yet, so apologies if my solution which worked on the D1 may not be an option for you at this time.