Database Users

[Q] Possibly bricked MT4G after attempting root with visionary 14, please advise

So like the total noob I am I tried to root my MT4G using visionary v14 (I think, can't start my phone to check) without having all the appropriate files in place. This caused Visionary to crash when I rebooted my phone. I gave it some time and then being unable to restart using the power button I pulled the battery. After that the phone has been totally dead, I can't get it to turn on at all or even recognize that it is plugged in. I have tried starting plugged into my computer, unplugged, plugged into charger and all possible combinations of SIM card and SD card in/out. Nothing. I am very afraid I bricked the damn thing, but I'd appreciate any input... especially since the the replacement would come with Gingerbread and I really don't want to have to go through the whole downgrading crap.
Thanks.
Cheers,
RobotPenguin

Hello RobotPenguin,
I'm not a specialist (actually, I'm quite a newbie here) but most of bricked device can boot to the bootloader or at least display the splashscreen.
Are you sure the battery is alright and correctly installed ?
Regards

I assume so. It was fully charged when it crashed and the "tech" at the T-mobile Store swapped out the battery in my phone with the charged battery from her functional MT4G to no benefit.
Thanks.

I believe this may be my answer... damn.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1231765
I swear I searched for hours... I guess wrong keywords. That's what I get for frantic sleep deprived searching...
Cheers,
RobotPenguin

Well, lets check to see if it is bricked
1: pull the battery out
2: put the battery back / put on the battery door.
3: hold the power button and the volume down rocker.
* the device should boot to a white Screen with three Android Skateboarders.
**If you get to that screen it's a good thing.
**if you don't then you are SOL.
4: try doing a factory reset from that white screen
5: reboot the phone.
If it still doesn't boot you need to load the PD15IMG.zip onto the root of the SD card and start over.
If the PD15IMG.zip doesn't load (given the MD5SUMs match), or give you any errors at all you are SOL.

neidlinger said:
Well, lets check to see if it is bricked
1: pull the battery out
2: put the battery back / put on the battery door.
3: hold the power button and the volume down rocker.
* the device should boot to a white Screen with three Android Skateboarders.
**If you get to that screen it's a good thing.
**if you don't then you are SOL.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I got that far and no recovery screen... so I guess I'm SOL. I guess I'll just wait for the new one to come from T-mobile and do the whole downgrade bit so I can root the phone. Pain in the @$$, oh well.
Thanks for helping me out.
Cheers,
RobotPenguin

Most probably you've attempted to flash Engineering HBOOT ("root.sh" way of rooting) and failed, which left your phone without bootloader.
You can't recover from it.

if holding power and volume down does not get u into hboot then u r screwed. Hopefully u didn't cheap out and got the insurance for your fone. If u do have insurance on the phone then call asurion (the insurance company t mobile uses) and tell asurion that u lost your fone (say u left it on the bus).then pay your deductible and get another fone.

I have rooted 2 myt 4gs and they both crapped out for 3-10 days then magically started working. The whole time they were down all they would do is flash an orange light and vibrate 3 times when i powered on or vibrate 5 times and flash green when i tried bootloader. I pulled the battery out and left it out the first one was 3 days and the second time was close to 10 days then bam they came back up

+1
Thanks for the info guys

Thanks for the ride

So my otherwise trusty I9100 decided that it wanted to sleep the eternal black sleep. Yesterday it locked up and I had to remove the battery. When powered on, it asked for the password for the encrypted storage (I do not have encrypted storage that I know of). I could only power off or reboot at that point. I chose shutdown and let the phone rest for a couple of minutes. Then I started it again and then it went into eternal boot loop. I powered off by holding the power button and when that seemed to fail, I removed the battery. I tried to enter the normal boot menu (running standard firmware 4.1.2). This failed. I tried to use the volume down+home+power button and that to my relief showed the warning about installing a custom os. I proceeded and Odin started on the phone. Great I thought. I can at least flash the phone and have a phone again. I downloaded the firmware and Odin 3.0.7 and proceeded to flash. Odin 3.0.7 could detect the phone and started sending the cache image preparing instructions to the phone. This took a long time and then it timed out. The phone still showed the Odin downloading screen. I tried to restart the software on the pc, but that failed right away. I tried to restart Odin on the phone, but the phone was now completely dead. Black screen forever.
For reference, I have flashed with Odin before (long time ago) and it worked as intended. Besides, I was following the troubleshooting guide presented here on this site for the S2 and right now, I can get zero signs of life from this phone.
Seeing as my friends S2 died after 2-3 years with black screen of death and my sisters S2 died with black screen of death, also after approx 2 years and now my phone after close to 3 years, I can only suspect that Samsung has made the phone to die this fast. I only know of 2 more persons that have such a phone and their phones are not so old yet. But I guess theirs will die after 2-3 years as well. :-/
So, it was interesting having a smartphone and I liked it, but now I am back on my trusty old Nokia i6110 (has run 11 years without issues and with original battery, still lasting 3-4 days per charge).
But I'd like a new smartphone, just not a Samsung. They have burned me enough.

I just learned that the phone might be salvageable using the JTAG interface. So, any JTAG'ers around the Århus, Denmark area?

galmok said:
I just learned that the phone might be salvageable using the JTAG interface. So, any JTAG'ers around the Århus, Denmark area?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
There's a thread called jTAG centre near you or something like that, look it up, maybe you can stike luck.
My device is like 3 years now, but it's gonna live forever, I'ma see it thru

If you have any linux (get a live cd for free everywhere) at hand post 'lsusb' into an terminal when the phone is connected. if it shows up any sign of an active usb device it might still be alive, else it truly is a jtag case

[Q] Continuous reboot into "No Command"

Hey everyone I really hope you can help me out here. Last night my completely stock Nexus 7 2012 locked up during normal use. It had KitKat 4.4.4 on it not rooted or unlocked. I THINK usb debug was enabled but don't honestly remember. After the lock up I forced it to power off. When it started up again, it was stuck with the 4 circles going round and round. After a long wait I went into recovery and tried to wipe the cache. This went on for almost 10 min but never completed. I forced it to power off again (and here is where I panic and things get fuzzy. I tried to get back into recovery and just restore it but I can not get it to do anything except boot to the dead android picture and a message that says NO COMMAND. I've tried to use the VOL UP and Power button sequence to get the menu and it won't come up. It stays on that screen for a few seconds and then it acts like its restarts but I never see the google logo just this dead android flashing on and off with the no command error. I've read several threads, tried the WUG toolkit as well as skipsoft toolkit but with the device stuck in this loop nothing can communicate with it. I removed the cover and unplugged the battery which gets the machine to shut down but when it powers back on even with key sequences I can't get anything but this dead android. I can use power and VOL up to get into APX mode but that is my only other option. Please give me some more suggestions!

Well things have gotten worse now I can no longer get past the black and white google screen. I'm guess this thing is just toast.

How old is it? If it's under a year, you can RMA it back to ASUS and they'll fix it for free. Since you haven't rooted it nor unlocked it (although I don't think that would be an issue anyway), they shouldn't have any issue with repairing it. Just be sure you didn't leave any signs that you opened it or else, that will void the warranty and they won't repair it for free.

Its exactly 2 years old today. It was a birthday present. funny how it chose today to die.

Okay just so I can have some closure here,
The tablet will not shut off when I hold power button it shuts off and comes right back on to the google logo.
I can NOT get into boot loader or recovery at all. No key sequences work what so ever. I've been into recover and boot loader before on this device so its not that don't know how.
The only time it gets detected by my PC when plugged in via usb is if its int APX mode which as far as I can read is useless to me.
So is there any other secret or is it just trash now?
Thank you.

My wife's was doing this when it failed an OTA. Hold the power button long enough the screen will go dark for a couple seconds.when it's dark, hold all three buttons down and wait.it will go into fastboot.use nexus root toolkit to flash stock+ unroot and select bootloop .
---------- Post added at 09:56 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:55 PM ----------
Ps it did this because she accepted an OTA not knowing I had TWRP on there.

KANDL said:
Okay just so I can have some closure here,
The tablet will not shut off when I hold power button it shuts off and comes right back on to the google logo.
I can NOT get into boot loader or recovery at all. No key sequences work what so ever. I've been into recover and boot loader before on this device so its not that don't know how.
The only time it gets detected by my PC when plugged in via usb is if its int APX mode which as far as I can read is useless to me.
So is there any other secret or is it just trash now?
Thank you.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
"The tablet will not shut off..." <<---- This suggests that you are seeing or observing something happening. But based on your previous posts I can not tell exactly what you are now observing - the black & white Google logo?
I would start first with trying to determine if the battery is capable of being charged. The last thing you want to be doing is fooling around with this stuff with a nearly dead battery.
If you put it on a 2A wall charger (*not* a PC USB port), does the tablet warm up a little after 20-30 minutes? If so, leave it on the charger for at least 2 hours. (Heck, even if it doesn't warm up, same advice - put it on the wall charger for at least 2 hours)
OK, next item for you to consider. In Android devices, there is usually a nonvolatile storage area (maybe in the "misc" partition?) called the BCB (Boot Communication Block). The bootloader will always look at that area first, and if there are no boot instructions in there, by default the bootloader will attempt to load & jump to the entry point of the contents of the LNX partition (Linux boot partition). This would cause a "normal" Android boot to occur by default when turning the power on. The other two common instructions in the BCB are for a reboot into the recovery, or instructions for the bootloader to stay resident but drop into it's fastboot mode.
Why am I telling you this? Because there are certain pathological situations that can develop into loops without apparent escapes. Imagine that the tablet was sitting in custom recovery mode, and the dummy behind the PC keyboard flashes some random garbage to the recovery partition, and then uses the touch interface to reboot into recovery. What happens is that "boot to recovery" instructions are placed in the BCB, and a soft-reset of the device occurs... which (when the hardware finishes resetting) loads up the bootloader.**
Now the bootloader sees the "boot to recovery" instruction in the BCB, and attempts to load the garbage in the recovery partition. Eventually - either due to a watchdog timer reset, or a illegal instruction trap, the device will soft-reset again... WITHOUT EVER CLEARING THE CONTENTS OF THE BCB.
In this example, the bootloader is intact and operational, but the looping behavior continues until the battery drains. You don't get an opportunity to communicate with it in fastboot mode because it is always trying to load the bad recovery. Either there is a way to break out of this death spiral... or their isn't.
Now, one more thing - I lied slightly right around the ** annotation.
On the Tegra3 SOC, there is a kind of micro-kernel inside the Tegra3 that is responsible for loading the bootloader. Simpler processors of old would simply load a memory page at a specific hardware memory address when they reset, but this is far more sophisticated: the little micro-kernel in the Tegra3 can evaluate the bootloader to see if it has the correct cryptographic signature and so forth.
If that micro-kernel doesn't like what it finds, the Tegra3 will put the USB port into APX mode. This is important because it is diagnostic: if your tablet always goes into APX mode, for instance after disconnecting/reconnecting the (charged) battery and then powering up the device, then you are probably out of luck; but if it doesn't go into APX mode, that suggests that the bootloader is actually healthy, but perhaps thrashing in one of those nasty boot-loop cycles.
OK, still with me?
Have you looked at this thread carefully?
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2133986
It suggests that possibly you can get the bootloader to ignore the contents of the BCB by a carefully-timed press of the Vol-Down button - which, if it works - should let you escape to fastboot mode. This is documented in the above thread as "bootloader interrupt".
So, questions for you:
1) Are you sure the battery is well charged? (Not easy to tell without a voltmeter or heating of the tablet during charging - the temperature of the tablet will drop after it finishes charging. One way to be sure of things is to disconnect the battery, reconnect it, and then put it on the wall charger. That way you can be sure that the tablet is not on, so any heat would be due to battery charging, not other components running. FWIW, a discharged battery will be about 3.5v, and charged about 4.15v.)
2) Does the tablet always go into APX mode when it starts up, even if you only press the power button?
3) Once the battery is charged, what are you seeing on the screen during start-up? After you have disconnected the battery and reconnected it, do you see anything on screen when you put the tablet on the charger?

bftb0, Thank you for attempting to help me out, I really appreciate it. I understand 99% of what you wrote, and that gives me a little bit of hope! Let me begin by answering your questions.
1. I am certain the battery WAS charged. as I had just pulled it off the charger when this happened. Also I'm certain the battery IS charging when I plug it in. It does get warm after a while. The battery did drain down now since my last post, but I have removed the cover and unplugged the battery to get it to power off. Now it is currently charging back up as I'm typing this. I can see the battery charge indicator on the screen while its laying here.
2 and 3. The tablet does NOT go into APX mode by its self. It only does that when I hold power and VOL+. It now currently powers on with a press of the power button goes to the black screen with with the white google logo and stops. After that I can no longer get it to power off without manually disconnecting the battery. I can get it to reboot and go right back to the same google logo. Prior to it doing that it would go to the android on its back and just say no command. That screen would flash on and off like it was contentiously rebooting. However after trying all day to get some sort of menu to come up and different key sequences it now only goes to the google logo and stops.
I have it currently charging and will let it charge to full capacity while waiting for you to reply. I tried and tried to get the boot interrupt to work from the thread you posted in your reply and it wither does not work or I'm simply not doing it right but I'm willing to try some more if it will save this thing and I don't have to go buy a new one.
Thank you again for your help!

Well, because you have a pure stock tablet and the problem occurred spontaneously and under innocuous operating conditions, the most likely explanation is some type of hardware failure affecting the eMMC NAND chip.
Even if that is the case ... AND you successfully are able to get to fastboot mode ... it still might not be repairable. It could be a modest failure (e.g. something affecting the cache partition only, which could knock offline both the normal boot as well as the recovery boot), or it could be an enormous fraction of NAND.
eMMC NAND is supposed to be able to degrade gracefully, so there is a small chance that erasure and formatting of partitions will release blocks that have failed. But it could also be that the failure is extremely severe and no recovery is possible even if the bootloader is still intact.
I imagine you've already tried it, but since it will be your only possible means of rescue I would try the bootloader interrupt trick (Vol-Down approximately when the b&w Google logo appears - hold it down for 3-4 seconds)
Since the tablet gets stuck in a hardware reset loop, you should probably unplug the battery after every failed attempt, start it up normally (power button only), and then press and hold Vol-Down as soon as you see the Google b&w logo. Perhaps with the use of a stopwatch, you could experiment with slightly different timings, possibly even try the button press a second or two before you expect the logo to appear. I am not aware of any other way to get to fastboot (without having a booted kernel as in the recovery or normal os); and it may also be that the only time that the Vol-Down button has any effect is under the "default" (empty) BBC contents. If that is the case you are probably SOL.
The objective is to try and get the tablet into fastboot mode by any means possible.
If it were happening to me, and I was able to get that to happen, the next thing I would do would be to erase the entire tablet (except the bootloader) using fastboot, and then follow that up with an installation of a stock recovery (and formatting of cache, system, and userdata in that order), and then follow that up with a "factory reset" using the stock recovery.
If you can get just the recovery and (bootloader) fastboot mode working again, there is an outside chance that the tablet could be put back into service.
A little bit of explanation is in order here for me to explain why I am suggesting this. Sometime after I got my tablet, I spent a bunch of time dumping *all* the device partitions (things like MISC, USP, PERS, etc in addition to the "normal" Android partitions) before/after certain fastboot operations. What I noticed - by accident - was that I was seeing data that belonged in a certain partition showing up in other partitions. And always in block-sized offsets.
I think that what I was observing was an artifact of the eMMC wear leveling / block remapping that is part of the device's FTL (Flash Transition Layer). Literally, blocks were being shuffled around - even across partition boundaries - when they were in an unused/erased state.
In addition, if you look at the Google instructions for flashing a factory image, you will note that sequence is
erase p1
erase p2
...
erase pN
(followed by)
format p1
flash p2
format p3
...
That is, **as much as possible is erased before anything is put back into service**
It is my presumption that this happens to give the wear leveling and bad block remapping process of the eMMC chip maximum flexibility (as most everything in the device is marked as not in service it should be easy to remap based on block write counts as individual partitions are put back in service via via flash and format operations). Can't prove that though.
It looks like you did your reading about APX mode - there is a risky and fairly complicated procedure available to rooters that allows them to capture some custom (unique per tablet) file blobs that allow re-installation of a bootloader from APX mode, but is a procedure that has to be performed ahead of time. (And because the file blobs are unique per tablet - encrypted & signed with a unique hardware identifier, you can't get someone else to generate them for you) So APX mode is of no value to you afaik. It's barely of value to rooters as well. (I will say that I haven't kept up over the last year, so there is always the chance that someone discovered something new wrt the Tegra3 and APX mode that I don't know about - but that's the way it was a year ago or so)
Well, good luck with your tablet - I suspect you are going to need a bit of good fortune.

Thanks you so much for your help. I will continue to try the boot interrupt and see if I can get it to go. Failing that I guess I'll be shopping for a new one. I really appreciate your time in trying to help me.

I am about to go crazy with this evil phone. j320a variant with complete stock firm

Ok, so this all started about a week ago. My dad has had this phone and for the most part has enjoyed it. The other day he calls (from the house phone) to let me know that his phone doesn't work. I was expecting the typical black screen so hold all the buttons to force a reboot and boom hero for the day.
God no. This phone would suddenly not boot properly at all. I mean I had trouble getting stock Recovery mode to even come up or download mode. I bought a new battery thinking it could help. Twice now I have managed to use ODIN to reflash stock firmware of 7.1.1 . Both times the phone would be fine and suddenly it would turn off and bam the same thing over again. Firmware screwed and it doesn't want to turn on reliably. Recovery mode would display all sorts of errors with mounting /efs and dm verity errors....
This must be a hardware problem right? I don't know what else to think at this point. Is it possible the restore of his backup from sammy cloud is corrupting it? I am willing to try this one more time and not restore any of his files or is it hopeless? Is there something fried?
And just for the record, I am not new to ODIN/Rooting/Custom Roms/ etc but at no point EVER has this damn phone been attempted to be rooted or anything. I hope someone has something positive to share or just put me out of my misery so I can destroy this f******* phone into a thousand pieces.

Has anyone ever had an issue where the plastic back cover is somehow causing the phone to short out or overload which makes it freeze or turn off? I swear this back cover is the cause of all of this. Last night i reflashed everything and really just forgot to put the cover on. It stayed on all night without a single issue. I rebooted and powered down multiple times and it turned right back on. Then I put the back cover on and what do you know, difficulties with powering on and freezing.
On the top right above the sim/microsd slot there is that spot with metal looking conduction material or something and it is also at the bottom near the charge port. What are those things? At this point the phone has become a pet project and I just have to have the answer. My dad already got a new phone lol. Any ideas?

M30s does not boot - stuck at very first screen

Hi all,
my Gylaxy M30s rebooted itself yestarday, and now is stuck at the very first screen (the one showing "SAMSUNG Galaxy M30s" in the center and "Powered by android" at the bottom).
Vol down + power results in a reboot attempt (screen goes black, vibration), but the phone is stopping at the same screen again.
I am not able to turn the phone off.
Switching from Vol down to Vol up immediately when screen goes black does not enter recovery mode.
Vol down + power while charging sometimes leads to the charging symbol being shown on the screen, but without the percentage in the middle.
Charging over night did not help.
The phone cannot be connected to a Win PC.
Any suggestions what I can try?
Thanks,
Alchemist

Try volume down+volume up and while pressing those buttons, plug your phone into your computer. Tell me the results of that.

Nothing happening...

I mean trying those combinations immediately after using power+ volume down to reboot.

What did you do with your phone? Died suddenly when normally using?

Yes, phone died during normal usage.
Ah, I see - a screen comes up warning me that downloading a custom OS might harm the phone.
Also, the PC makes this "USB connected" sound when I then press Vol up, but I do not see a new drive connected, I think.
I am slightly optimistic now?

Press volume up.Then install Samsung usb drivers(search on Google)

Ugh, just wanted to do this, but now the phone is completely dead. No response to any button or charging. Will hang it on the charger for a few hours, but my optimism is gone...

OK, now it works again. I am in the screen with the colourfull stuff and the phone waits for some download.
Driver is installed on PC. Is there anything supposed to happen - the phone is still not accessible via PC, or is it?

Install Odin (search in Google 'odin samsung' and download)
Download stock firmware(android os) at www.samfw.com , after downloading you will see files like AP-M505xxxxxxx.tar.
Select, from the stock ROM AP-M305xxxxx.tar for AP in odin CSC-M305xxxxx.tar for CSC, and so forth then click start .

OK. All data will be lost, right? Is there some way to access the internal storage to rescue some files before flashing the new firmware?

Sorry to tell you that you cannot have data restored bad news for you sorry

Sorry. If you only see one file(make sure it is .tar or .tar.md5 file) after you extracted the .zip firmware, install it to the AP slot.

Any chance I could fix this issue with tools like dr.fone, UltFOne, ReiBoot?
I do not have any experiences with these - no idea if the just want to make money with desparate customers? ...

These could possibly brick your phones even more ( anyways flashing with Odin could also brick your phone). However, it in some cases can fix your device.
If you HAVE to have your data back and you don't mind paying, visit a service center and tell them: 'Hey my phone died and i HAVE to have the data back '.(I know, your warranty is expired probably, but they might still do the things for you with paying.)(if those stores closed during lockdown then I don't know any way to fix it.)

OK, another thing I have observed: The screen goes black after about 30 sec to 5 min when not charged - the shorter it was charged, the quicker the screen goes black. Buttons do nothing when screen is black. When reattached to charger, phone tries to boot and is then stuck at said screen - no button pressing needed for the phone to try to start. The longer the phone has been without charger, the longer it takes until the phone tries to boot.
Maybe it's just the battery that is dead - or would the phone with a dead battery boot normally when attached to charger?

If that is the case, open up your phone, put in a replacement battery, and try to boot up(yes, you need to. it will be a frustrating process.). Your phone could be having a faulty battery and nothing else, to cause this issue.

Im having the same problem mentioned above. The samsung service centre says to replace the motherboard which costs almost half the price of the actual phone..

Mystic_Jamdam said:
Im having the same problem mentioned above. The samsung service centre says to replace the motherboard which costs almost half the price of the actual phone..
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Truth to be told: The guy in the repair shop opened the phone and wanted to change the battery - when he saw that water must have come into the phone, corroding the motherboard. So yeah, all data lost, but... no backup, no mercy. I now have set up a NAS for all computers and devices in our family... ;-)

If it really is a hardware problem then the quality must have been really bad.