Odd Behavior on Boot

ksutherland91

Member
Jul 30, 2012
10
2
0
I have a stock unrooted Verizon Galaxy S5. For several months my phone has been plagued by several issues at startup. Whether I reboot the phone or start it up after the battery has died, it always enters an odd state immediately after loading and seems to get stuck in this state for an undetermined and variable amount of time (anywhere from a few seconds or minutes to hours or even overnight).
While in this state, this is what happens:
1. Screen stays on. Once I unlock the phone, the screen stays on. The side button doesn't do anything to lock the phone or turn off the screen. Holding down the button, however, still triggers the power menu. The screen timeout never triggers, even though it should turn off the screen after 2 minutes of inactivity.
2. WiFi and Bluetooth turned off. Even if they were turned on before I powered down the phone, they are not enabled when the phone first boots up. I can manually turn them on but the WiFi will not connect to a network, even if one is available. It may show it is connecting to the network, but it gets stuck at "Checking the quality of your internet connection" and continues to use the 4G network for data connectivity. This happens no matter what WiFi network I am within range of, so it's not an issue with the network or router itself. If I am not near a network at all I will still experience the other problems of not being able to lock the phone, etc.
3. Startup applications don't load. I have Tasker on my phone, but it doesn't load and show it's notification bar icon.

Otherwise, I can use the phone normally and open applications, surf the web, etc. It seems that loading some applications and using the phone eventually causes the phone to exit this mode, but I haven't been able to find a single particular application or series of steps to fix the problem. If I power on the phone and don't use it that just seems to make it take even longer to fix itself.

Once it gets out of it's weird state, the WiFi connection will become active (it will turn on WiFi if I haven't done so manually already) and it will connect to a known network if one is available, the phone will lock itself or I can do so from the side button, and things like Tasker and Power Save mode will turn on.

I am stumped as to what could be causing this problem or how to fix it. It seems the phone may be doing some kind of check, maybe related to Knox, that hangs during startup and prevents certain things from working until it straightens itself out.

Any clues into what this problem is, what is causing it or how I could further analyze this problem and determine its cause would be greatly appreciated.
 

ludeawakening

Senior Member
Dec 7, 2010
1,389
2,059
153
Gadsden, Alabama
Have you installed any official updates from Verizon at any point? I've heard of phones having phantom problems like this after receiving a bad update. I would definitely contact Verizon if you did update at any point. If not then like BigBot96 said, contact Samsung about the problem.
 

RyanThaDude

Senior Member
Jul 20, 2011
259
55
58
My wife's Note 2 did something similar when the battery died. I had to factory reset. Her phone was rooted/unlocked & running a custom TW ROM, though. May I suggest doing a complete factory reset and Odin. Backup data to computer or external sdcard since this will clear the entire device.

Edit: After rereading OP's post it actually sounds like an app is hanging at startup which could cause this behavior. A logcat should tell you what's going on.

Sent from my SM-G900V using Tapatalk
 
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