Boox Max2 Pro - Only shows Top toolbar after boot

Have about a year old Max2Pro and without any update/software addition, it developed an issue where after booting normally, the top menu bar would appear, but nothing else (home button, battery indicator, wifi, etc)

  • I can hit the ContentBrowser button (top right) and the title-bar for the ContentBrowser appears, but nothing else.
  • I can hit the power button and this either puts the Max2Pro to sleep, or on a slightly longer press, causes the popup to appear to Power off, reboot, or cancel, and these three options work as expected (but after reboot/power-off, the same behavior is observed on next boot)
  • I can hold the menu button (left most) and the eink screen will refresh, as expected
  • I can hold the left and right arrows and, I think, the unit does a screen capture, but can’t be sure.
    That’s it for apparent control outside of recovery mode.

Rarely, if I wait long enough (hours) the Max2Pro will indicate with an android popup dialog that a process is not responding and ask if I should close it - by this time, the normal GUI is up and working and it doesn’t seem to matter if I stop/restart the non-responding process or not, the unit works, until the next time it goes to sleep, then the same thing.

Updating to the last two firmwares (in order) has not remedied this behavior, in-fact, I think the 2.2.2 (or whatever latest is) has made it worse, as only ONCE has it booted properly, after the initial firmware update (which did work and reboot fine)

Because the unit is ‘hanging’ after boot, it is also killing my battery from a full charge in a short order (I do NOT believe I have a battery issue, this is a ‘dead process chewing up the battery’ issue) But as we know, getting a Boox to work from a stone dead battery is a further complication. I can get into the recovery mode, and have cleared the cache partition (no effect) but need to get contents off before doing a factory wipe (not desired, but perhaps last course of action before giving up on Onyx products.

Any thoughts/suggestions on identifying, killing, fixing whatever is hanging after boot? There’s been two different “process not responding” culprits over the past two months, I’ll note here which specifically if/when it every boots/runs normally again.
I do not have Android ADB setup, but could if/as necessary - open to likely paths to recover (or strong confidence that if/when I can get to the file-system, I can remove PDFs with annotations, then factory reset, and then restore the PDFs with annotations )

More details. Twice now in the past 4 days it has booted (eventually) and when fully operational, reports “Process system isn’t responding Do you want to close it” and / or “ContentBrowser isn’t responding Do you want to close it” sometimes both, or one or the other.

Once up and working, the system seems to run fine, however as it burns through whatever is killing it on startup, the battery does definitely drain. It certainly could be a dying battery, but over the course of the past year, I’ve charged maybe once a month, and when using the Boox, (when booted) the system responds fairly normally, and battery drain appears to be normal. I’ll try uninstalling all 3rd party apps and see if that avoids the issue, but any others with similar experience, do share.

Hi, sorry for the late reply here. Could you pls submit this on Feedback via Settings/ Feedback on your device and our team member will have a better and faster diagnosis of the problem.

And what should be done when the unit can NOT be booted into to hit Settings -> Feedback? There really MUST be a better process offered to customers than to require them to having a working unit in order to request support.

The reason for sending it via the feedback function of the device are the logs that are automatically attached to your message. Without the logs or the device itself the developers/engineers cannot understand what’s wrong with your device and therefore cannot support you. Most people don’t even know what logs are. Explaining them how to extract them manually add attach them to an email is futile. So having a feedback function in the settings is a good way to solve this problem. But Onyx should ate least implement a confirmation message send by E-Mail. At the moment you have to rely on the “your feedback was successfully submitted.”.

If you cannot start your device and send a feedback from the settings, then do a factory reset. A couple of days ago I posted an introduction how to hard reset your Boox device. If you still have problems and can’t even access the feedback option in the settings after, then your device is damaged and you should ask for a repair/replacement via the support page of Onyx.

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I just want to say that I experience exactly the same problem on my Max2, blank screen with only the top bar showing when booting. I have submitted a feedback via the feedback function, as suggested.