Why does my phone occasionally show the boot animation? I have a Motorola XT720 on eclair. A couple times, I've seen it show the boot animation (mystical Motorola logo), usually it's while it's sleeping. After I see the boot animation, I am on Emergency calls only, just like when I first boot my phone. (I'm not sure if this is normal either.)

I just saw this now, and it was plugged into my computer (usb debugging enabled). I had it set to memory card access and ejected it and switched to portal &amp; tools. It sat for a couple minutes and then I saw the logo. I touched the screen and it showed my lock screen.

I'd assume this is a crash and reboot, except that if I goto Settings > About phone > Status, I see the uptime listed as 116 hours.

What is the phone doing? Does anyone else see this behaviour?



Update: I read elsewhere that it may be related to the SD card and I've started fscking whenever it happens.

First I find out where my device is connected (I'm on /dev/sdb1) and then I fsck.

grep fat /etc/mtab
sudo fsck.vfat -r /dev/sdb1


fsck will do interactive repair and ask you how to fix the errors. After I get one of these crashes, there are errors to repair. I think this has reduced the crash frequency.



Update 2: I put in an old 1 GB SD card awhile ago and I don't remember the last time I saw one of these crashes.
This is a crash and restart of the android runtime, without a crash and reboot of the underlying linux operating system kernel.   The uptime refers to the underlying linux, so it is maintained across the framework restart.

The difference between a framework crash and restart vs. a kernel crash and reboot is not very apparent to the end user, since there's no visual console while the gui is down; from a debugging perspective though they are very different and imply bugs in different parts of the system.

For point of comparison, if you connect to a device by adb (and I think this even works on a secured, ie not rooted one), you can cause a framework restart by typing

stop ; start


and a reboot by typing

reboot


You may or may not see any difference in sequence of splash screens, though the framework restart may be a little faster than a reboot.