Xperia Z1 unable to charge properly, keeps trying to turn on

[Alfons_McBobr]

Greetings,

My phone's battery drained after heavy use, now when I plug it in the charger, the phone automatically tries to turn on (the sony logo appears) but it shuts down shorty after and after about 3-4 seconds tries to do the same again, repeating indefinitely. Appears as if the bootup eats the little charge that manages to get to the battery within those couple seconds and when some charge gets into the battery again, the phone tries to turn itsself on again, eating the charge.

I tried the power + volume up button combo, the physical off button next to the sim slot, the phone still for some reason tries to turn on preventing the battery to charge properly it seems. Any way I can force the phone to stay off so the battery charges properly?

This has been only happening for cca 2 hours or so, gonna try keeping the phone plugged in overnight to see if it manages to somehow unstuck itsself from this loop, but if that doesn't help, I don't know what else to do besides removing the battery and charging it separatelly.

[Uliwooly]

@Alfons_McBobr 

Remove both SIM and SD cards and try again, did you dropped the phone and/or exposed to water recently? 

[Alfons_McBobr]

No physical damage to the phone whatsoever. Just the battery drained to the point where attempt to turn it on only causes the 3 red flashes. Plugging it in causes what i described above.

[Uliwooly]

@Alfons_McBobr 

I just realized that you have the Xperia Z1 not the XZ1, this is important as the battery it's really old; you  probably have to replace it.

I have an Xperia Z1, that I use every other day, the battery won't last more than 45mins, before I have to recharge it 

[Alfons_McBobr]

Thing is that I have replaced the battery once about 3 years ago and until now it worked just fine, it has shown some wear sure, but it was still good enough to last a day of average usage, is it really possible it just died so fast?

[Jonas]

Hi @Alfons_McBobr, sorry to hear about this.

Just to make sure that you try everything possible, do you have another charger to charge the device with? It could be the battery that is on it's last leg as @uliwooly mentioned, but it's very hard to say for sure without having the device inspected.

You can of course also try and perform a software repair, but this will delete all data on the internal storage, so it's the one of the last things to try.

Keep us posted!

[Uliwooly]

@Alfons_McBobr 

Batteries usually after 2 years won't hold as much charge as new. Test @Jonas suggestions first if not you might want to consider a new battery.

[Alfons_McBobr · Accepted solution]

So, I might have actually revived the phone. I figured that plugging it in using a normal charger triggers the startup, so maybe using a lower power charger might lowkey stealth charge the battery without the phone "noticing", thus not trying to start up. So I borrowed friend's powerbank with one of the outputs being limited to 1A,plugged it in and the red LED lighted up, which probably meant it was charging. After couple minutes the LED went dark, but the powerbank kept charging (it would have shut down otherwise). So I left it charging for good 3 hours or so, until the powerbank went empty (it was only half full). After that I plugged it in the original charger, to which it didn't react, so I did the volume up + power button restart and it tried to start up the same way as before, but this time around it had enough charge to actually "boot up" to the powered-down charging (just the battery being displayed) with only 6% of the battery (after supposedly pulling around 3000mAh from the powerbank). I'll leave it charging powered down like this for a while and see what happens. Hope this works.

[Alfons_McBobr]

Looks like the phone is fine, battery fully charged and seems to hold.

Thanks for your help

[Jonas]

Hi again @Alfons_McBobr!

That is awesome news, I'm so glad to hear that you got it working again!

I can understand if you are a bit scared to let the battery go to 0% again now after having to borrow a power bank from a friend to get it running again and hopefully it won't be such as a hassle the next time it reaches 0% (if that will even happen).

Thanks a lot for getting back to us with the solution and have a fantastic day!