Major issues - crashing, IO not working, firmware not updating. (FW 13, 13gen i5)

Hi everyone,
For the past week I have been having countless issues with the framework 13, 13th gen i5 laptop.
I’ve been trying to troubleshoot it, and will do my best to explain what I’ve seen/discovered so far. I am close to abandoning it, and am hoping the community will have some advice for me.
Initially I was running windows. I have been for the past year. Problems began with the external monitors being very difficult to make the system recognize. Then I found the laptop would hang when booting up and down, requiring me to forcefully power it off, by holding the power button and trying again until it worked.

I subsequently decided to update the firmware, and then the BIOs. My Bios was a bit out of date… I think 3.05 - > 3.07 was the update. For some reason, updating the BIOs failed midway through, and then managed to work a second time.
Still, the problems persisted afterwards, and I decided, that maybe running linux will somehow change the situation.
I first tried bluefin. It seemed to work nicely, no problem with monitors, but then would randomly freeze whilst using it. It froze between 5 minutes - 3 hours from boot. I checked the logs and there was no error message prior to freezing, making it difficult to identify the problem. There were occasional bad packet checksum errors in my logs for the EC. Maybe this is a hint?

I thought… perhaps Bluefin, being a new distro, is unstable. So I tried, fedora, ubuntu, and linux mint and all of them had the same problem. Sad, but makes sense, they are more or less all the same kernel at the end of the day right?

Every time it crashed I tried to identify something in the logs, to no success. I ran a memtest overnight and nothing is wrong with memory. SSD and battery health seem to be okay.

I did a hard reset of the board by following a guide made by framework. It seemed to work successfully. Linux still crashes (tried bluefin again) and windows has the same issues as before.

Now I am back on windows and the bluetooth radio is not detectable, sometimes I/O doesn’t work, i.e. the monitors again. It doesn’t crash at least. It still hangs in booting up and down at least once before working. Also, the driver update for port01 retimers crashes about 30% of the way through progress. I can’t update them! Maybe another clue?

These issues are a huge hindrance on my ability to work efficiently, especially when devices I need are just undetectable. Super annoying.

What should I do? How can I determine what the cause of this issue is? I’d appreciate any help with this issue! I’d like the repair the laptop if possible.

Thank you!!

P.s. sorry, I didn’t save the logs from linux :expressionless_face: . I can try installing it again and replicating the crash later if it will help.

Someone had a similar case recently where their board had a bad “side” and the firmware literally would not update on that half of the board. (I think it even reported v0.00) Most things worked but they had some strange anomalies that got more frequent. They replaced the board and it appeared to be a hardware issue with that mainboard.

It would be worth contacting Framework support to see what their thoughts are. If you are out of warranty, at least the mainboard can be replaced and you are back in business.

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