Database Users

Too much Flashing = bad?

Is too much flashing bad for our phones? I've seen people asking sellers how many times they've flashed their phones with custom ROMs and this worries me . I do do a task 29 before every flash btw... Just wondering of any side effects of over-flashing.

you can do around 100,000 to 1,000,000 read/write operations to each cell in flash memory before it starts to enter danger territory.
So no, its very unlikely to cause any issues unless you change rom every day for 30 years.
(in theory, anyway, anyone stress tested the flashing process?)

This is news to me!
I didn't know flashing could damage a phone!
But surly you'd have to flash 100's/1000's of times before that!?
only an idiot wouldn't read up on each rom and flash after flash after flash afte... (you get my point lol)

lonelykatana said:
only an idiot wouldn't read up on each rom and flash after flash after flash afte... (you get my point lol)
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you, sir, are clearly NOT a Beta Tester

uh oh!
Dear readers,
This is really a valid topic - flashing is a bad bad thing.
Especially out side of schools.....get u in all sorts of trouble.
- I flash every few days - end up spending my friday nights doing it sometimes - thats gotta be bad news!!

Yeah, it's not so much how often you do it.
The fact is, each time you flash, you risk bricking your phone.
The Law of Averages will run into Murphy's Law at some point and you're gonna be screwed ;-)
I've flashed my Excalibur about 20 times, my Wing about 30, my Kaiser 12 and my Rhodium 3 times (HardSPL, Radios don't count!). I haven't bricked a phone since 2007, but sooner or later this will catch up to me too :-D

I'm flashing many years many times a day and never bricked a phone.
5 to 10 times a day believe it or not.
Knock on wood.
Snarksneeze said:
Yeah, it's not so much how often you do it.
The fact is, each time you flash, you risk bricking your phone.
The Law of Averages will run into Murphy's Law at some point and you're gonna be screwed ;-)
I've flashed my Excalibur about 20 times, my Wing about 30, my Kaiser 12 and my Rhodium 3 times (HardSPL, Radios don't count!). I haven't bricked a phone since 2007, but sooner or later this will catch up to me too :-D
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General everyday read/writes to the filesystem represent a LOT more wear than 10, 100 or 1000 ROM flashes during the phone's life.

Well, every Data the phone saves on its internal memory and every Data thats viewed by you (includes booting) will read/write the internal memory.
Flash Memory has a limited lifetime due its material wearout.
If you will ever get to this point within warrenty it maybe covered .
Only think you can do against it is to take out battery and never ever touch your phone.

I remember maybe a couple of years ago in the Touch Pro forums, there were a few cases of people "killing" there Touch Pros by overflashing. This worried me for a while, but since I only ever reflash probably about once a week and buy/sell every 6-12 months, I don't think it will ever cause me a problem.
I haven't seen a recurrance of this problem since my Touch Pro days, so maybe something was different about that particular device. But now I feel like I've tempted fate, I'm not gonna say any more!

SAME
Laurentius26 said:
I'm flashing many years many times a day and never bricked a phone.
5 to 10 times a day believe it or not.
Knock on wood.
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I have flashed many times a day including beta testing for many roms/phones currently my HTC G1 is acting really wierd lately ever since I flashed that EXTREMLY SUPER FAST ROM and its been acting as if it were bricked at times, it wont even boot up it gives me that black screen (when you have a brick) so im going to an OEM rom and stop flashing for that phone now just to be safe
But I think I have flashed THOUSANDS of times my 2 EXCALIBURS, WING, TILT, TILT2, G1, Mytouch, and my cool new HD2 and not a SINGLE BRICKED
Im soo proud of myself haha lol

Laurentius26 said:
I'm flashing many years many times a day and never bricked a phone.
5 to 10 times a day believe it or not.
Knock on wood.
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Click to collapse
lol i flash as much myself

Avoid JI6 update.

From what I gather from trolling on both XDA and the Tmo forums this update is bricking phones regardless of root, voodoo, ocfl, kernel perhaps people should avoid the update pending a more in depth investigation of what exactly is going on. If gps is needed flash the JI2 files found here and that should hold you over for now. This is a worse problem than the ones that came in the captivate and the sprint galaxy s.
Sent from my SGH-T959 using XDA App

I updated manually through odin and it worked just fine. I first went back to stock and started fresh. Gps test found six birds and locked on four thats the best I ever had sitting in front of my doorstep in a heavily wooded area. It would usually find at the most two and would not lock to any. So far so good.

Only speaking for myself.... I flashed it and it's fine. I hope this isn't just a bunch of people freaking out that phone stays at the Galaxy S splash screen for a while and remove the battery or something, thereby f*cking up something. But I don't doubt you.

How to fix your phone and apply the update:http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=803492

My concern comes from the overwhelming amount of people that seem to have that problem I for one I'm going to play it safe and wait til a stable rom based on this release is well released.
Sent from my SGH-T959 using XDA App

Bernardos70 said:
Only speaking for myself.... I flashed it and it's fine. I hope this isn't just a bunch of people freaking out that phone stays at the Galaxy S splash screen for a while and remove the battery or something, thereby f*cking up something. But I don't doubt you.
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It wasn't hanging on the Galaxy S splash screen. It was hanging at the Vibrant screen. The logcat clearly shows an endlessly looping segfault.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=8525623#post8525623
I have an excerpt of the log, which is similar to another user who had the same issue.
Points of commonality so far with another user who had stock + root + brick is we both disabled the boot sounds + titanium backup + rom manager.

yespinosa said:
My concern comes from the overwhelming amount of people that seem to have that problem I for one I'm going to play it safe and wait til a stable rom based on this release is well released.
Sent from my SGH-T959 using XDA App
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Considering that the people who contribute to the XDA and T-mobile forums represent a fraction of the installed base, "overwhelming" may be an overstatement.
"Lots" of people also report successful installs.

i flashed through odin, so did my roomie, and his friend got the ota. everything went smoothly. i think that we are not hearing nearly as many people that the update went well compared to those who have had issues. we all had root, blackbar mod, mobile ap, captivate camera, and i had gps from ji5. no problems. do a nandroid and put it in a safe place then go for it.

Worked fine for me as well.

yespinosa said:
From what I gather from trolling on both XDA and the Tmo forums this update is bricking phones regardless of root, voodoo, ocfl, kernel perhaps people should avoid the update pending a more in depth investigation of what exactly is going on. If gps is needed flash the JI2 files found here and that should hold you over for now. This is a worse problem than the ones that came in the captivate and the sprint galaxy s.
Sent from my SGH-T959 using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The only people who should probably avoid the JI6 OTA, are people who fail to understand they have a responsibility for their own potential grief when they mod their phones in ways T-Mobile and Samsung cannot easily account for.
Granted we should hold T-Mobile's butt to the fire if their OTA is indeed soft bricking or hard bricking bone stock unmodified phones, but I don't see any clear evidence of this at all. And it's not too surprising either, as very few people who come here have bone stock devices, and fewer still are willing to revert to bone stock simply to test.
Rather what I see are people utilizing these wonderful forums to do wonderful things to their phones without having to have developed anything remotely approaching a keen understanding of what they've actually done. It's ridiculously easy to mod these phones without having the first clue what you're doing. This leads to many mis-perceptions which easily turn into noise.
There is a level of responsibility you have to take upon yourself if you're going to participate actively in modifying your device. For some it's just easier to deny this responsibility and quest for someone to blame. That may not always be the case, but it's clearly taking place with some few people over this OTA.

Agreed. We are an incredibly tiny segment of the universe of smartphone users out there. The vast majority of people buy an iPhone or Android make calls, sync their contacts and calendar, surf the web, email and text. If you started talking about rooting or jailbreaking they'd look at you like you're insane. The people rooting and modding their phones are a tiny minority, and we assume all the risk when we do it because this is not normal and customary use of the phone. Most people use their phones stock, and people who don't are assuming the risk of things going bad.
I'm fairly convinced after the Captivate OTA fiasco that you put your phone at real risk of not being able to get successful OTAs if you flash custom ROMs or kernels. The deepest I'm willing to go is rooting and lagfixing, but even then I know I'm playing with uncertainty.

masterotaku said:
The only people who should probably avoid the JI6 OTA, are people who fail to understand they have a responsibility for their own potential grief when they mod their phones in ways T-Mobile and Samsung cannot easily account for.
Granted we should hold T-Mobile's butt to the fire if their OTA is indeed soft bricking or hard bricking bone stock unmodified phones, but I don't see any clear evidence of this at all. And it's not too surprising either, as very few people who come here have bone stock devices, and fewer still are willing to revert to bone stock simply to test.
Rather what I see are people utilizing these wonderful forums to do wonderful things to their phones without having to have developed anything remotely approaching a keen understanding of what they've actually done. It's ridiculously easy to mod these phones without having the first clue what you're doing. This leads to many mis-perceptions which easily turn into noise.
There is a level of responsibility you have to take upon yourself if you're going to participate actively in modifying your device. For some it's just easier to deny this responsibility and quest for someone to blame. That may not always be the case, but it's clearly taking place with some few people over this OTA.
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+1 to one of the most cogent comments I have ever seen here.
One footnote about the risks for ordinary end users: If T-Mobile's OTA process bricks a stock phone, apparently the carrier's typical procedure is to replace the phone. If the phone is not stock, the customer is probably on his own for a remedy. Pottery Barn rules are real. Smarphones are not cheap, and having your phone number tied to this handheld computer (or at least the carrier) by contract makes device failure harder to cope with.

Kubernetes said:
Agreed. We are an incredibly tiny segment of the universe of smartphone users out there. The vast majority of people buy an iPhone or Android make calls, sync their contacts and calendar, surf the web, email and text. If you started talking about rooting or jailbreaking they'd look at you like you're insane. The people rooting and modding their phones are a tiny minority, and we assume all the risk when we do it because this is not normal and customary use of the phone. Most people use their phones stock, and people who don't are assuming the risk of things going bad.
I'm fairly convinced after the Captivate OTA fiasco that you put your phone at real risk of not being able to get successful OTAs if you flash custom ROMs or kernels. The deepest I'm willing to go is rooting and lagfixing, but even then I know I'm playing with uncertainty.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I've flashed this phone more times than I can count at this point. Soft bricked it at least a dozen times. But all that self imposed grief has got me to where I am now, where I can (hopefully) reliably recover from just about anything. I still cross my fingers every time I crank up Odin3 v1.3, but I no longer visibly sweat!
We're fortunate in that these phones are surprisingly difficult to hard brick for the most part, and that given a bit of legwork one can recover from nearly any bad scenario.

It's better to flash stock ROM and then JI6 ROM manually like me and it works for me like a charm !

d01100100 said:
It wasn't hanging on the Galaxy S splash screen. It was hanging at the Vibrant screen. The logcat clearly shows an endlessly looping segfault.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=8525623#post8525623
I have an excerpt of the log, which is similar to another user who had the same issue.
Points of commonality so far with another user who had stock + root + brick is we both disabled the boot sounds + titanium backup + rom manager.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Then I don't know if what I'm about to tell you or not, but I have and use Titanium Backup and ROM Manager. Odin went through smoothly. That leaves the boot sound as the culprit. Had a couple of things metamorphed as well as mobile AP and the GPS files from JI2 installed, if that helps.

Bernardos70 said:
Then I don't know if what I'm about to tell you or not, but I have and use Titanium Backup and ROM Manager. Odin went through smoothly. That leaves the boot sound as the culprit. Had a couple of things metamorphed as well as mobile AP and the GPS files from JI2 installed, if that helps.
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Even though you installed ROM manager, have you used it to install Recovery? Did you have a current ROM backup update.zip file created on your internal sdcard?

I'm just gonna throw my 2 cents in here...i did the update over an edge network and everything was fine..I have rooted then unroot and the ocl
Sent from my SGH-T959 using XDA App

It can be fixed

Last night I spent 3 hours trying to fix my phone. I got every problem that had surfaced in this forum. I got the dreaded force close loop of hell, the 0.0 internal memory, I had trouble flashing back to stock but in the end I prevailed.
The hardest part of fixing my phone was going through all the threads of people complaining that they need help and that they are having problems just to find the helpful threads. Everyone has problems you just have to be patient and read. Everything needed to fix most problems can be found in this forum so please take the time to read and remember search is you friend.
Sent from my 1.2 OC Fascinate using Voodoo magic.

CHA0S.LUIS said:
Last night I spent 3 hours trying to fix my phone. I got every problem that had surfaced in this forum. I got the dreaded force close loop of hell, the 0.0 internal memory, I had trouble flashing back to stock but in the end I prevailed.
The hardest part of fixing my phone was going through all the threads of people complaining that they need help and that they are having problems just to find the helpful threads. Everyone has problems you just have to be patient and read. Everything needed to fix most problems can be found in this forum so please take the time to read and remember search is you friend.
Sent from my 1.2 OC Fascinate using Voodoo magic.
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Click to collapse
::knuckle bump::
Sent from my SCH-I500 using XDA App

I couldn't agree more!
I spent 8 hours working through my 'disable voodoo' debacle. I'm barely literate when it comes to modding and hacking, so I knew the risks. Much like you, I managed through it with reading, perserverance, and probably a little luck.
The way I see any 'brick' issues is this:
1. Don't mod/hack your phone if you aren't willing to search, read, and work through possible issues. The phone works fine without any modifications.
2. Much like highly dangerous jobs, never get comfortable with modding a phone....thats when you make mistakes. Have a healthy respect for the fact you might accidently click the wrong button!
3. Don't flash another phone's rom (E.g. Vibrant on a Fascinate)
4. Never click the "Phone" section in Odin
5. If you've followed rules #3 and #4 and run into a problem: if the phone shows any signs of life after YOU have messed with your phone, it is very likely you can recover....maybe not perfect, but recover you can!
6. Read, read, and read.....then if you still have a problem, ask.
7. IRC Chat seems to be the quickest way to get 'free tech support' from folks, but remember, they aren't paid to help you, they aren't paid period...be nice, be respectful, and realize we are all fallible.
8. Lastly, don't give up. You'll probably learn something in the process and will feel better when you have managed to solve your own problem.
At least that is what I have learned as a noob....and I have PTSD from removing Voodoo....LV, OC, Voodoo.....so, so tempted to try it again though!

I love my fascinate. As a total android newb with some winmo experiences, I was very excited about customizing my phone even more. It took a full weekend of 8 hour days, but I've successfully installed nearly every upgrade I could dream of, after meticulously backing up at each stage of the way. The experience of modding the phone itself was the best intro to android I could dream of, and by reading all the threads through to their conclusions, I never ended up with a significant problem that I couldn't fix by renaming something from .old/.bak or a quick trip to odin. Amazing!

As my third Android device, I can admit that this phone has been a complete and total pain in the a$$. It is also easily the best device I've owned.
Sent from my SCH-I500 using XDA App

[Q] Habitual flashing lead to shortened device life expectancy?

Hey, just kind of curious...I was reading someone posting about flashing a plethera of ROMS thoughout the life of his G1 and he said one day it just bricked on him. So do you think that a consistenet flashing of different ROMs or just updates etc...will "wear" out your phones hardware? Is it relevant?

nvram has a limit to how many times it can be written to, so all devices have somewhat of a life expectancy. Flashing your phone shouldn't do anymore damage than daily use since its being written to almost constantly.

Jaskwith said:
Hey, just kind of curious...I was reading someone posting about flashing a plethera of ROMS thoughout the life of his G1 and he said one day it just bricked on him. So do you think that a consistenet flashing of different ROMs or just updates etc...will "wear" out your phones hardware? Is it relevant?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The answer to the title of this thread is... Not in your lifetime! Take it from someone that's flashed A LOT.

Avoid Bricking

thinking about going with the international note! I live in the US so there is no warranty for us here so i wanted some users honest opinion.. how hard is it to brick? and what should i definitely avoid especially after watching so many users brick with just that one kernal

samtruongg said:
thinking about going with the international note! I live in the US so there is no warranty for us here so i wanted some users honest opinion.. how hard is it to brick? and what should i definitely avoid especially after watching so many users brick with just that one kernal
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what kernel?

Angelom? i think it was where it fried many users motherboards

hmm problem is a lot overclock their phones or undervolt it without testing it gradually and finding the sweet spot...flashing the kernels (custom) dont brick phones, mostly its the users (who dont bother to read and just do it)...if you are afraid to brick i guess you have to stick to stock...

Just avoid ICS until it is official. Then give a little time for custom ROMs to pop up based on the official version. You might even consider, as hard as it may be, not updating to the official ICS directly after it shows up. Give those with warranties enough time to try it out first and report stability.

great idea really appreciate it! any clue as to what is the best, stable gingerbread based rom is?

beestee said:
Just avoid ICS until it is official. Then give a little time for custom ROMs to pop up based on the official version. You might even consider, as hard as it may be, not updating to the official ICS directly after it shows up. Give those with warranties enough time to try it out first and report stability.
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indeed...ive seen the posts...theres no ics kernel yet that is stable or proper for the note as of the moment as there is no kernel source release yet...and flashing into wrong phone versions will almost do the same
Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk

You can always consider getting a 3rd party insurance plan from Squaretrade or Ensquared. Some of the forum members with International Notes on here have either of those insurance plans. I'm looking into getting it myself (1 year plan) when I receive my Note from the 1saleaday.com promotion. Still hasn't shipped out as of the time of this posting . I figure 1 year insurance would be OK since I'm putting the phone on Straight Talk prepaid (thus saving roughly $50/month) instead of getting on AT&T's plan, which comes out to saving $600 in one year. After one year of insurance the phone breaks, dies, etc., the money I saved by going prepaid, I can use it to buy the same phone (can probably get a used Note at a cheap price after a year) or another phone, and by then the Galaxy Note 2 should be out.

Not meant to be a prick but 1daysales is pretty shaddy seller. Friend ordered some.gadget from them last year took him a month to get it just to find out it was a refurb
Sent from my GT-N7000 using Tapatalk

ICS does not cause any problems with actual bricking of the device. The only actual bricks I have found of this phone have come from flashing a touch version of the newest CWM...I was hit hard by this myself...and since I live in the US as well, I was forced to by an entirely new phone.

smalmagal said:
ICS does not cause any problems with actual bricking of the device. The only actual bricks I have found of this phone have come from flashing a touch version of the newest CWM...I was hit hard by this myself...and since I live in the US as well, I was forced to by an entirely new phone.
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^ this is the number ONE thing i am trying to avoid!

You shouldn't have to worry, man. It was a freak thing. That's not to say something like this couldn't happen again, but tampering with any Android phone shouldn't cause you any trouble if you know what you're doing. Another phone was hit by the same CWM touch kernel issue as well...and there were plenty of bricks around as well. The Epic 4G, I think? It fried the internal memory (EMMC) and made the phone completely useless. It's called "The Monster" 'round these parts. ;-)

smalmagal said:
You shouldn't have to worry, man. It was a freak thing. That's not to say something like this couldn't happen again, but tampering with any Android phone shouldn't cause you any trouble if you know what you're doing. Another phone was hit by the same CWM touch kernel issue as well...and there were plenty of bricks around as well. The Epic 4G, I think? It fried the internal memory (EMMC) and made the phone completely useless. It's called "The Monster" 'round these parts. ;-)
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a lot of note users had that issue as well...im new at the threads on note and they had warned me about it...any links on the discussions about the touch bricks?thanks
Sent from my GT-N7000 using Tapatalk