[Q] Boot Loop - AT&T Samsung Galaxy S 4 Q&A, Help & Troubleshootin

I've had my AT&T SGS4 for about 3 weeks. Rooted on day one and running a custom recovery (shabbypenguin's CWM) since since the exploit was released. Finally had some time this weekend and decided to take a new ROM for a test drive. I began by making a nandroid backup. Once the backup completed successfully I accidentally started another backup instead of just rebooting. I let it run its course but the second backup failed, probably due to insufficient space on my device. I select reboot device and get stuck at the at&t splash screen. Multiple battery pulls later and I still cant get it to fully boot up.
Fortunately, I'm still able to boot into recovery but now I have a dilemma. I have 2 backup files:
1970-01-20.03.09.08
1970-01-20.03.18.31
Which one is the first backup file I created (i.e. the one that completed successfully)?
Is it the one with the earlier time stamp? This would seem logical but for the fact that every time CWM runs on our phones it resets to 1970. So do I want the one with the later time stamp (i.e. the one that took longer to run from the default time stamp)?
What would happen if I try to restore the incomplete nandroid? Do I run the risk of losing recovery all together?
Hope the above makes sense. Any help would be appreciated.

Try both....the worst that can happen is that it fails. If one fails then u know it's the other one.
Sent from my SCH-R970 using Tapatalk 2

Really...he's right try both.

Tried both. The first failed on restoring system data. The second never made it past verifying md5. Did a system restore but it kept rebooting shortly after startup.
Luckily I had already downloaded shostock's rom and was able to load with no issue. Just wish I had backed some stuff up before making the plunge.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I337 using xda app-developers app

Related

[Q] Nandroid Backup Issue

I seem to have encountered a rather unusual issue with my nandroid back up. I was planning on flashing CM7 to test it out, and then after my test return to my backup. CM7 worked like a charm, but I was going to wait until I had more time on my hands to fully explore the rom, so I decided to do a nandroid restore using Clockwork Mod 3.0.2.4. It worked... sort of. After the restore, I rebooted. It brought me to my normal unlock screen, but when I unlocked it, I was presented with the MT4G initial setup, as if I had done a restore with the stock img. I knew my data is still in there, because it remembered little things, like my initial lock screen, my wifi settings and a couple of other things. I went hunting through a couple of forums, and found that the MT4G has issues when using clockwork 3.0.2.4 to flash non-Gingerbread, and that you ought to use clockwork 2.5.1.2. Thinking that may have been my problem, I tried, and it then told me there was a MD5 mismatch. I followed the recommendations found in this post http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=976453 for finding and correcting mismatched MD5s (the data.img file was the one with the mismatch if that helps). Now it flashed properly, but resulted in the same problem I had earlier... after reboot, I am presented with my lock screen, but then taken through the MT4G setup. I have a TI backup, so I'm not really worried, but, I am curious if anyone can shed some light on what happened to my restore so that it doesn't happen in the future, and so that if someone else has this problem, they can have it a little easier than I have.
Thanks in advance for your help,
WestBC
Any thoughts!
Basically, stick with froyo or GB. Don't jump back and fourth.

Another (LPY-related ?) crash

What a scare.
This morning when I took my Note, apps, including system apps, kept force closing.
I had installed LPY, through Mobile Odin, the moment it was available, and before I could take notice of its i/o bug, I had already wiped dalvik and cache, restored a gingerbread nandroid backup, and reinstalled LPY without bricking (luckily). Thereafter, LPY had been running more or less graciously, even if with the deep sleep problem which the turning off in offline mode and pulling out battery trick managed to cure only for few hours each time.
Well so I was looking at my apps and services crashing, and I turned my Note off. I also pulled battery out, then turned on again.
Result: stuck in first logo, N-7000.
Off and on again: starts in download mode.
Then I think: the OS must be kaputt... But I have my latest nandroid backup in gingerbread, made immediately before flashing LPY. Flashing it is a risk since I'm with the faulty LPY kernel and CWM. But I am far from any Odin installation, I have no computer with Samsung Kies and drivers, and the first time I was lucky... Why not again?
So this time I boot in CWM recovery and start restore. Restore stops saying "error on /system".
I think "good, so I have destroyed my /system partition, so next time I turn off and on I get a superbrick, fine!". I have nothing to lose now, so try again turning off and rebooting in recovery.
In recovery I try again restoring my nandroid. And this time it completes the restore process (which subjectively lasted for hours, believe me).
Reboot in gingerbread. Get gingerbread. Bootlooping three or four times, then stable.
I'm writing this with my Note with LC1 and Cfroot, and I'm a happy guy.
But what a scare.
Sent from my GT-N7000 using xda premium
debernardis said:
What a scare.
This morning when I took my Note, apps, including system apps, kept force closing.
I had installed LPY, through Mobile Odin, the moment it was available, and before I could take notice of its i/o bug, I had already wiped dalvik and cache, restored a gingerbread nandroid backup, and reinstalled LPY without bricking (luckily). Thereafter, LPY had been running more or less graciously, even if with the deep sleep problem which the turning off in offline mode and pulling out battery trick managed to cure only for few hours each time.
Well so I was looking at my apps and services crashing, and I turned my Note off. I also pulled battery out, then turned on again.
Result: stuck in first logo, N-7000.
Off and on again: starts in download mode.
Then I think: the OS must be kaputt... But I have my latest nandroid backup in gingerbread, made immediately before flashing LPY. Flashing it is a risk since I'm with the faulty LPY kernel and CWM. But I am far from any Odin installation, I have no computer with Samsung Kies and drivers, and the first time I was lucky... Why not again?
So this time I boot in CWM recovery and start restore. Restore stops saying "error on /system".
I think "good, so I have destroyed my /system partition, so next time I turn off and on I get a superbrick, fine!". I have nothing to lose now, so try again turning off and rebooting in recovery.
In recovery I try again restoring my nandroid. And this time it completes the restore process (which subjectively lasted for hours, believe me).
Reboot in gingerbread. Get gingerbread. Bootlooping three or four times, then stable.
I'm writing this with my Note with LC1 and Cfroot, and I'm a happy guy.
But what a scare.
Sent from my GT-N7000 using xda premium
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You probably need to install abyss4.2 kernel, flash it thru cwm, reboot in recovery then only you can do your nandroid, as i know, this is the safest way to do nandroid from ICS back to GB
lasted for hours??
i think patience is also a part of playing with LPY...
but for me, LPY is a NO-GO, so i flashed GB nonwipe on PC Odin and wiped on stock recovery..
CastielChong said:
You probably need to install abyss4.2 kernel, flash it thru cwm, reboot in recovery then only you can do your nandroid, as i know, this is the safest way to do nandroid from ICS back to GB
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Maybe I wasn't clear... It's A-OK now, even after all those wipes under LPY. So thanks for your advice, I might need in the future, but luckily not now.
Sent from my GT-N7000 using xda premium
I also had error on /system/ used redpill to restore a fresh ICS backup, although I am unable to remount /system with rw now, but that could be if the commands have changed for ICS or kernel 3.0
It does freak you out when you see error on /system/

Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 Recovery Post Mortem

A story you might find some useful morsels in . If you are impatient, yes, a happy ending.
Monday night I opened the case on my tablet and it was booting. I figured that was strange and after a few minutes realized it was just stuck booting. So I rebooted it. Came up... and then suddenly during the everything loading up phase, rebooted. This repeated several more times.
Uh oh. Working quickly between boots I unset the default on Apex launcher (since it updates frequently) and turned off the live wallpaper. I also shut off Wifi. No effect.
Next stop recovery. Cleared caches, etc. Nope. I had a fairly recent backup but took another one and it worked (whew). Decided that I would do a data wipe from recovery. Uh oh. Any attempt to format /data causes a crash.
I go to Odin to see if I can repartition flash. I can't find a PIT file for the P5113 but did find one for a 16K 7 inch model. Odin repartitioned it but still no joy. Wiping data causes a reboot. So does trying to restore a backup to /data.
Next stop Kies. You can tell it to reload firmware but you need your serial number which is written on the back of your tab (yes it is, it is about the height of a carbon atom). However, it asks you to enter "recovery" mode by pressing buttons that aren't on the tablet. I tried Odin mode but it couldn't connect. Using CWM recovery didn't work either.
So I decided I needed stock recovery. I could not find a P5113 stock recovery that wasn't bundled with an entire update package. So I unpacked an update package to get recovery.img. Flash_image didn't work (seems like it never works on this tablet, and now that I think about it, I think I wrote a thread on how to do it with dd that I forgot about last night! Duh: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=31293383&postcount=32). Instead, I repacked just recovery.img with tar. Odin was able to flash this and I was back in the ugly stock recovery.
I never did try Kies though because I asked the stock recovery to reformat /data and it worked! Back to Odin to reflash CWM and then the backup I made Monday night rolled back on and I was back in business.
Restore my screen saver, redefault (is that a word?) Apex, and turn Wifi back on. Oh yeah, and run Triangle Away
So I'm not sure what to make of all this. Open questions:
1) Did I need to repartition? What's the right PIT file to use? I sure wish Odin could dump a clean image, but if it can, I don't know how.
2) What mode does Kies want? This could have been a VirtualBox problem but I got it to work before I got Kies installed on my wife's real Windows box (man Kies is slow!).
3) Why could stock recovery reformat /data but CWM could not?
4) Would it have been sufficient to just reflash the stock recovery, do the data wipe? I suspect so, but don't know.
Anyway.... things are back to normal. Love the tab, but sure wish these big companies wouldn't assume we don't know how to fix our own stuff and muck things up with "simplified" tools. By the way, this is the "touch" CWM that seemed to fail to fix /data. I did not try the normal one.
wd5gnr said:
A story you might find some useful morsels in . If you are impatient, yes, a happy ending.
Monday night I opened the case on my tablet and it was booting. I figured that was strange and after a few minutes realized it was just stuck booting. So I rebooted it. Came up... and then suddenly during the everything loading up phase, rebooted. This repeated several more times.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Here we go again. Same problem but I'm not even getting into the boot. Does anyone know how to actually reformat and rescan flash for bad blocks? I have a feeling I have a bad flash block that is doing something evil.
Sigh.
Tried a different approach this time.
Booted to recovery and did an fsck on /data since it seemed to have the problem.
It did a lot of clean up and now I'm back up. Not sure what got damaged if anything though. Time will tell.
Good to hear that it is a happy ending, bro!
Sent from my AT1S0 using xda app-developers app

Am I Soft Bricked?

Long story so please bear with me. I have a Sprint I9505. I had installed a rom which made me lose mobile data and I eventually called Sprint to help me restore it. I of course did not mention that They did a great job of helping me but one of the things that they made me do was a hard reset. I did so and went about going through the process of re-configuring my phone but it will not let me get past the wi-fi set-up screen because the wi-fi will not turn on. So that's where I am stuck. I rebooted into recovery mode and see that I still have CMW installed but it will not read my external 64g card nor will it let me mount it. My intent was to restore a nandroid back-up that I had made prior to installing the rom that gave me the issues. But no luck. I have my phone next to me and although it is not going past the wifi set up screen, I still hear my phone vibrate and the screen turns on so I assume that I'm still receiving notifications. I tried to install the I9505 firmware and go back to stock but it fails everytime with about 10 percent to go. I tried to download the firmware for Sprint but it gives me a download error after completion (I assume that it is a PC issue not a firmware issue). So I'm assuming that I'm not totally screwed since I can still get into recovery mode. I'm in a bit of a time crunch since I'm going out of the country Saturday and would like a working phone before then. Thanks to all of you in advance for any help that you can provide.
louie68 said:
Long story so please bear with me. I have a Sprint I9505. I had installed a rom which made me lose mobile data and I eventually called Sprint to help me restore it. I of course did not mention that They did a great job of helping me but one of the things that they made me do was a hard reset. I did so and went about going through the process of re-configuring my phone but it will not let me get past the wi-fi set-up screen because the wi-fi will not turn on. So that's where I am stuck. I rebooted into recovery mode and see that I still have CMW installed but it will not read my external 64g card nor will it let me mount it. My intent was to restore a nandroid back-up that I had made prior to installing the rom that gave me the issues. But no luck. I have my phone next to me and although it is not going past the wifi set up screen, I still hear my phone vibrate and the screen turns on so I assume that I'm still receiving notifications. I tried to install the I9505 firmware and go back to stock but it fails everytime with about 10 percent to go. I tried to download the firmware for Sprint but it gives me a download error after completion (I assume that it is a PC issue not a firmware issue). So I'm assuming that I'm not totally screwed since I can still get into recovery mode. I'm in a bit of a time crunch since I'm going out of the country Saturday and would like a working phone before then. Thanks to all of you in advance for any help that you can provide.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Try to flash the stock firmware + .pit file for your phone using Odin
Thanks, I'm the process of downloading the Sprint firmware from a different link from my previous one to see if that works or if it's my PC.
Aerys said:
Try to flash the stock firmware + .pit file for your phone using Odin
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Sigh most wifi and data issues from roms come from a kernel issue never hard reset with faulty connections you should of imediately went into recovery and flashed the nandroid some roms arent out of the oven yet i would put that card in a card reader see if you can copy the nandroid and push it to the phones internal storage (if all possible) and see if it will boot off of that if not see if you can get the ruu
Sent from my HTC One X+ using xda premium
gothicasshole said:
Sigh most wifi and data issues from roms come from a kernel issue never hard reset with faulty connections you should of imediately went into recovery and flashed the nandroid some roms arent out of the oven yet i would put that card in a card reader see if you can copy the nandroid and push it to the phones internal storage (if all possible) and see if it will boot off of that if not see if you can get the ruu
Sent from my HTC One X+ using xda premium
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
this is Galaxy S4 my friend

Backup help

I am new here. I have an issue with the recovery images that i try to apply. I made a backup of my phone using twrp and when i loaded up a bunk rom i immediately went to go back to my stock image and it wont get past the loading screen. just sits there. I have two phones and used the second one to make a backup with cwm recovery and nandroid backup. everything is looking good as far as the backing up, but when i go to install the backup i get errors such as error flashing boot and what have you. I am on the i337z ( cricket variant ) S4. I can install custom roms but they litterally take forever and a day to load up and when it does the wifi wont work or the mobile data wont work. nothing. Im lost. Please help XDA community.

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