Recent OTAs halting at 100%, never rebooting. On hard reset NVS partition is lost

[william.ferguson.au]

We have several hundred devices in the field. Up until recently OTAs have been seamless.

But out of roughly 20 OTA (guestimate), 4 have resulting the OTA halting after 100% download but before reboot.
All interaction with the device is dead, ie none of the other threads are getting CPU.
Device will stay in this state until hard reset or battery dies.

On hard reset, device attempts to boot but the NVS partition is missing.

While this has happened once in front of my eyes, I have not been able to replicate it again, so can't really provide any more info.

I saw this issue https://www.esp32.com/viewtopic.php?f=1 ... OTA#p99006 and am wondering whether it might be the same or similar. I will check whether the SPI flash speed has changed.

But the more pressing issue is for us for find a way to reflash devices out in the field as we have shown that this resolves the issue.

We have tried using the Flash Download tool, but it never connects to the device.
Since lots of others seem to be able to use the Flash Download tool, it appears we are missing something simple.
I would really appreciate any guidance.

Here is the issue https://www.esp32.com/viewtopic.php?f=2 ... 608#p98608

[william.ferguson.au]

Is anyone able to shed some light on why we can't get the FlashDownloader to connect?

https://www.esp32.com/viewtopic.php?f=2 ... 608#p98608

[william.ferguson.au]

ok, for anyone coming after, it appears to have been caused by a change to the SDKConfig/build to turn MD5 on for the partitions table. See viewtopic.php?t=12794