[Q] Phone Bricked - MK2 tar - Sprint Samsung Galaxy S 4 Q&A, Help & Troubleshoot

I seem to have bricked my phone. I flashed a couple roms and was having some random reboot problems (see http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2651923).
Long story short, I've odin'd the stock MK2 tar, trying to get it to stock to accept the NAE update. I can't seem to get it past the "Android is upgrading.... Starting apps." screen.
Yes, I wiped everything, and even did a hard factory reset. I re-rooted, and odin'd Philz Touch 6 recovery. I would assume I could flash a rom, but when I transfer a rom to my SD card to flash -- it's never there. I download rom (just tried stock(ish)v06) and mount USB in Philz, copy to sdcard1, and after about 3 minutes, the file looks like it's there. When I try to flash from Philz recovery, I do not see the zip file to flash it. I tried copying it to another directroy -- still no file.
Is it time to accidentally back over my phone with my car and call my insurance agent?

Related

temporary brick from reverting from froyo

Heres my situation:
I installed the froyo rom without installing the new CWM first. So i tried renaming the new cwm and replacing it with update.zip to no success, and never reverted back to the old one. Now i decided to revert back to stock, install the new CWM, and than flash the froyo rom. But something went wrong.
I flashed odin stock-i500-vzw-system.tar.md5, and upon reboot it sounds the vzw sound, but stays in the samsung bootup screen, and it won't go into recovery because my update.zip is broken.
My odin for some reason fails every time i try to flash the old recovery, or the old kernels, it only wants to flash system.tar.
Thats as detailed as i can get it for now, any help would be great.
look around for some different stock odin files. i had a hard time with flashing cwm files as my phone just wouldnt accept them for some reason.
i'm gonna try adrenalyn's system.tar, kernel and CWM DI01 package, see if this works. keep fingers crossed

Ive tried everything MF9/MJA stuck at boot

2 days ago i foolishly flashed to a stock rooted deodexed MJA zip from Cyanogenmod 10.2. (NO I DID NOT MAKE A BACK UP. I DID do a full data/cache wipe before i flashed) Things got really weird after that. Phone would not boot past the yellow sprint screen. I had a few different backups that must have been old so i tried restoring to an older Triforce MF9 backup that i had from 2 months ago. After that i was stuck on the triforce boot animation. I thought "maybe my kernel got mixed up when i tried flashing to MJA". Downloaded and flashed stock MF9 kernel NO LUCK.
Ended up using ODIN to install a factory stock .tar of MF9... same boot loop, cleared cache(this succeeded), tried clearing dalvik cache (but it failed). It booted up and YAY stock MF9 WITH ROOT. So after all the sprint bloatware loaded up i was prompted for an OTA 4.3 updated. I foolishly accepted. So my phone shuts down into recovery installs the update then goes to CWM and says "fix root? yes or no" i hit "yes". Since then NOTHING has worked.
I tried to ODIN back to MF9 again as mentioned before, nothing. I thought it may be a kernel issue, I found no info on the new MJA kernel. I successfully used ODIN to flash philz recovery.tar so now im on philz instead of CWM or TWRP. I attempted to flash the original stock rooted MJA.zip that got me into this mess, but no luck. I now can not get passed the "Samsung Galaxy S4 screen" (tried clearing caches, and battery pull too). Im downloading "KERNEL-SPR-L720VPUEMJA-1382157965.tar" & "SPR-L720VPUEMJA-20131030154609.zip" at the moment to flash with ODIN. Also i might add, it seems like any recovery i use, TWRP, CWM, Philz they dont fully install the rom .zip's. I hit "install zip from ext/sd-card" and its like a 2 second installation. NO MATTER WHAT ZIP I TRY. Kernels seem to flash okay.
I dont care about root, or knox. I just want my phone again lol.
Try going here
Tallyphillips said:
2 days ago i foolishly flashed to a stock rooted deodexed MJA zip from Cyanogenmod 10.2. (NO I DID NOT MAKE A BACK UP. I DID do a full data/cache wipe before i flashed) Things got really weird after that. Phone would not boot past the yellow sprint screen. I had a few different backups that must have been old so i tried restoring to an older Triforce MF9 backup that i had from 2 months ago. After that i was stuck on the triforce boot animation. I thought "maybe my kernel got mixed up when i tried flashing to MJA". Downloaded and flashed stock MF9 kernel NO LUCK.
Ended up using ODIN to install a factory stock .tar of MF9... same boot loop, cleared cache(this succeeded), tried clearing dalvik cache (but it failed). It booted up and YAY stock MF9 WITH ROOT. So after all the sprint bloatware loaded up i was prompted for an OTA 4.3 updated. I foolishly accepted. So my phone shuts down into recovery installs the update then goes to CWM and says "fix root? yes or no" i hit "yes". Since then NOTHING has worked.
I tried to ODIN back to MF9 again as mentioned before, nothing. I thought it may be a kernel issue, I found no info on the new MJA kernel. I successfully used ODIN to flash philz recovery.tar so now im on philz instead of CWM or TWRP. I attempted to flash the original stock rooted MJA.zip that got me into this mess, but no luck. I now can not get passed the "Samsung Galaxy S4 screen" (tried clearing caches, and battery pull too). Im downloading "KERNEL-SPR-L720VPUEMJA-1382157965.tar" & "SPR-L720VPUEMJA-20131030154609.zip" at the moment to flash with ODIN. Also i might add, it seems like any recovery i use, TWRP, CWM, Philz they dont fully install the rom .zip's. I hit "install zip from ext/sd-card" and its like a 2 second installation. NO MATTER WHAT ZIP I TRY. Kernels seem to flash okay.
I dont care about root, or knox. I just want my phone again lol.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
you need to try to install the Triforce MJA/4.3.1 kernal/MJA modem all at the same time. IDK what happened on the first try to boot loop you but once you updated the modem to mja you can't flash MF9 modem/kernel on top of it. Try that and let me know.
Tallyphillips said:
2 days ago i foolishly flashed to a stock rooted deodexed MJA zip from Cyanogenmod 10.2. (NO I DID NOT MAKE A BACK UP. I DID do a full data/cache wipe before i flashed) Things got really weird after that. Phone would not boot past the yellow sprint screen. I had a few different backups that must have been old so i tried restoring to an older Triforce MF9 backup that i had from 2 months ago. After that i was stuck on the triforce boot animation. I thought "maybe my kernel got mixed up when i tried flashing to MJA". Downloaded and flashed stock MF9 kernel NO LUCK.
Ended up using ODIN to install a factory stock .tar of MF9... same boot loop, cleared cache(this succeeded), tried clearing dalvik cache (but it failed). It booted up and YAY stock MF9 WITH ROOT. So after all the sprint bloatware loaded up i was prompted for an OTA 4.3 updated. I foolishly accepted. So my phone shuts down into recovery installs the update then goes to CWM and says "fix root? yes or no" i hit "yes". Since then NOTHING has worked.
I tried to ODIN back to MF9 again as mentioned before, nothing. I thought it may be a kernel issue, I found no info on the new MJA kernel. I successfully used ODIN to flash philz recovery.tar so now im on philz instead of CWM or TWRP. I attempted to flash the original stock rooted MJA.zip that got me into this mess, but no luck. I now can not get passed the "Samsung Galaxy S4 screen" (tried clearing caches, and battery pull too). Im downloading "KERNEL-SPR-L720VPUEMJA-1382157965.tar" & "SPR-L720VPUEMJA-20131030154609.zip" at the moment to flash with ODIN. Also i might add, it seems like any recovery i use, TWRP, CWM, Philz they dont fully install the rom .zip's. I hit "install zip from ext/sd-card" and its like a 2 second installation. NO MATTER WHAT ZIP I TRY. Kernels seem to flash okay.
I dont care about root, or knox. I just want my phone again lol.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You cant go from aosp to tw. You need to go back to stock. Just odin back to mj9 stock. Then reroot and use that rom with philz rec
Sent from my SPH-L720 using xda app-developers app

[Q] Help - Serious issues after failed Alliance flash

I posted previously about getting permission errors during my flash of Alliance, which turned out to be a bad file. MD5 checked ok after downloading, but must have been corrupted when copying to SD.
After re-downloading Alliance, I performed the following steps:
1 - Pit and Tar from Odin to stock NC4 using Odin 3.09 and files from Beans' thread. Checked tar file md5, all ok.
2 - Root with TowelRoot
3 - Installed SuperSU
4 - Installed Busybox
5 - Installed Safestrap 3.75 B04
6 - Reboot into safestrap recovery, factory wipe stock slot.
7 - Install Alliance ROM into stock slot.
8 - Reboot into recovery and flash NC2 kernel from here.
Alliance booted fine and all seemed Ok for a very brief time. I then started getting FC's (Hangouts, systemui, google search, acore, phone, contacts, etc). Practically everything was FC'ing at least once. I rebooted into safestrap and fixed permissions. This seemed to fix things temporarily, but then it would all start crashing again. In addition, I was also getting random reboots.
I figured it was a bad flash, so have made several attempts to factory reset and flash again, even completely wiping internal data a few times. Nothing seems to help.
So, I decided to go back to stock NC4:
1 - in stock recovery, factory reset.
2 - boot into download mode and odin stock NC4 with Odin 3.09.
I'm now on stock NC4 and STILL getting similar issues that I had after the Alliance flash. FC's, random rebooting, etc.
Has anyone got any ideas about what's going on or what I may have done or how to fix it?!
Many thanks.
Nobody has any idea what might be happening here?
If not, I'll ask another question - does anybody get random reboots in Alliance? If so, what are they most likely caused by?
Cheers.

Recovery can't mount /system S5 bricked

TWRP can't mount /system. Phone is a SM-G900T 16GB
- Running the latest version of TWRP I tried:
- Wiping, repairing, and reformatting from TWRP, also tried formatting data. I get a unable to mount '/system' error message every time.
- Using Odin and Heimdall to reformat using a downloaded .pit, neither works. I ran Heimdall in Windows and Linux (ran as sudo and admin). I re-downloaded the .pit multiple times and tried a couple different sources.
- Installing CWM using Heimdall, and ADB. In ADB and Heimdall I still have TWRP and in Odin it removes the recovery completely.
- Fix permissions gives the unable to mount '/system' error message.
- Installing ROM from Heimdall and TWRM
- Mounting /system with or without MTP
How it happened:
I was running Cyanogenmod 11 with encryption and updated to 12. CM12 was running great, flashed GApps, still running good. I signed in to my Google account and downloaded IPcamera. While running IPcamera I got an email, the screen started going crazy flashing between the alert and IPcamera screen, I couldn't do anything so I pulled the battery. When I rebooted it was stuck in a boot loop. I booted into recovery, it asked for my encryption password as usual. The password didn't work. I tried several times. I rebooted and tried again, still nothing. I rebooted again and this time hit cancel when asked for the password. I wiped everything and got the can't mount /system error. I tried everything above, nothing works.
I can't download my .pit so there is more wrong than just the data partition.
Any ideas? I would love this thing to no longer be a really expensive paperweight. I really can't afford to replace this thing right now
Thanks for your help.
Odin back to factory stock and use Samsung's stock recovery to do a couple of wipes.
Commodore 64 said:
Odin back to factory stock and use Samsung's stock recovery to do a couple of wipes.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That worked!! I don't know why the stock recovery can fix it when TWRM couldn't. It worked though. Thanks a ton!!
Commodore 64 said:
Odin back to factory stock and use Samsung's stock recovery to do a couple of wipes.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This didn't work for me every time I wipe in TWRP it just never installs the packages, or upon restart it just doesn't mount system. Wipe repair on TWRP doesnt work either
egyptshun said:
This didn't work for me every time I wipe in TWRP it just never installs the packages, or upon restart it just doesn't mount system. Wipe repair on TWRP doesnt work either
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm totally with you on wipes and package installs randomly failing on TWRP, but I have no idea why. Sometime in December, I made the switch to Philz CWM, and I haven't looked back since.
At any rate, it is always good practice to odin back to stock, use the stock recovery to do wipes (factory reset and wipe cache), and then odin Philz CWM or any recovery program of your choice.
If you're planning on loading Lollipop, then you might just download the latest from Sammobile, odin the stock and wipe, and then load your custom recovery.
Best of luck,
Commodore 64 said:
I'm totally with you on wipes and package installs randomly failing on TWRP, but I have no idea why. Sometime in December, I made the switch to Philz CWM, and I haven't looked back since.
At any rate, it is always good practice to odin back to stock, use the stock recovery to do wipes (factory reset and wipe cache), and then odin Philz CWM or any recovery program of your choice.
If you're planning on loading Lollipop, then you might just download the latest from Sammobile, odin the stock and wipe, and then load your custom recovery.
Best of luck,
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have a G900W8, there's no lollipop version for me. What phone FW can I flash and retain phone signals etc.
Captian Double post Double post here.
I'm going to snap my phone in half, it's been over 13 hours of trying to fix this. How does no one else have this problem?
EDIT: YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASSSSS I FINALLY GOT IT TO WORK > I HAVE NO CLUE HOW <

Koodo I337M S4 Bricked?

I have a SGH-I337M S4 via Koodo in Canada. I've spent 15 hours on this so far and am now really confused.
History: I installed Cyanogenmod a couple years ago. Recently wanted to change from that so I decided to install stock first via SamMobile for SGH-I337M Koodo. I downloaded 5.0.1 from here sammobile
I had it installed fine and then went to root, so I used Odin, enabled USB debugging - and installed CF Auto Root. That worked.
Then I went to install Clockwork Recovery mod and it errored out and I don't recall exactly what happened but now I'm stuck with the yellow exclamation point saying "Firmware upgrade encountered an issue. Please select recovery mode in Kies & try again.
In the TOP LEFT of screen is says:
ODIN MODE
PRODUCT NAME: SGH-I337M
CURRENT BINARY: CUSTOM
SYSTEM STATUS: CUSTOM
KNOX KERNEL: LOCK: 0X0
KNOX WARRANTY VOID: 0X1
CSB-CONFIG-LSB: 0X30
SECURE DOWNLOAD: ENABLE
WRITE PROTECTION: ENABLE
eMMC BURST MODE: enabled
1) I tried to do emergency recovery through KIES but my phone isn't being recognized in Kies.
2) I uninstalled Samsung USB drivers and tried just KIES alone
3) I tried just USB drivers with flashing stock firmware via Odin in download mode - it errors out and says no partition found or says FAIL in red.
I've read a lot but i'm not that technical when it comes to this.. not sure what to do at this point. I can get into download mode but I can't get anything to work.
Is the phone ruined??
No, the phone is definitely not ruined.
Are you using the original Samsung USB cable that came with phone? Tried different USB ports? Tried different versions of Odin?
With the phone on the "encountered and error screen", connect the phone to Odin and try to flash.
If Odin can't pull the partition information, you'll need to flash stock with a lit file for the phone. Your phone has 16 gb of internal memory?
audit13 said:
No, the phone is definitely not ruined.
Are you using the original Samsung USB cable that came with phone? Tried different USB ports? Tried different versions of Odin?
With the phone on the "encountered and error screen", connect the phone to Odin and try to flash.
If Odin can't pull the partition information, you'll need to flash stock with a lit file for the phone. Your phone has 16 gb of internal memory?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hi Audit,
Thank you for the reply. I was able to try the original USB cable now and loaded the stock Koodo firmware through Odin and it worked flawlessly. Once loaded and rebooted, it went right to the homescreen and skipped past all the normal setup stages, so I assume something on the phone was there already but just corrupted on a bad upgrade.
Never again using an older USB cable.
Whew, that was a learning lesson. Now I'd like to:
1) re-root again
2) Install custom recovery (clockwork?)
3) Install the marshmallow OS via Broken I believe.
I will keep the thread posted for others who need help and for my own reference.
Don't use cwm, use twrp and flash supersu via twrp to get toot. This has method has always worked with me. Also, I am sticking with twrp 2.8.7.1 for now as that is what works for me.
Root is not required to install a custom recovery or custom rom.
The data files were still on the phone because flashing with Odin doesn't normally overwrite the data partition.
I suggest using twrp to backup your phones efs partition and keep it safe in case it gets corrupted during a bad flash.
Alternatively, you could have flashed twrp from the error screen with Odin, performed a full wipe in twrp, and flashed the custom rom of your choice.
audit13 said:
Don't use cwm, use twrp and flash supersu via twrp to get toot. This has method has always worked with me. Also, I am sticking with twrp 2.8.7.1 for now as that is what works for me.
Root is not required to install a custom recovery or custom rom.
The data files were still on the phone because flashing with Odin doesn't normally overwrite the data partition.
I suggest using twrp to backup your phones efs partition and keep it safe in case it gets corrupted during a bad flash.
Alternatively, you could have flashed twrp from the error screen with Odin, performed a full wipe in twrp, and flashed the custom rom of your choice.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I did not know that. I thought I required root first and then had to install a custom ROM. Interesting.
Ok, so the plan then is to find twrp for my phone model and install that first... I'll search and try to do that now.
Flash the tar version of twrp in Odin as that is the easiest way in my opinion.
audit13 said:
Flash the tar version of twrp in Odin as that is the easiest way in my opinion.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Done. I used the latest one for the tar and I have v2.8.4.0 right now. I held volume up and power and it went to Teamwin with a bunch of options. Install/wipe/backup/restore/mount/settings/advacned/reboot
On the TWRP website it says: "Note many devices will replace your custom recovery automatically during first boot. To prevent this, use Google to find the proper key combo to enter recovery. After typing fastboot reboot, hold the key combo and boot to TWRP. Once TWRP is booted, TWRP will patch the stock ROM to prevent the stock ROM from replacing TWRP. If you don't follow this step, you will have to repeat the install."
1) I'm not sure what it means by typing that. I'd like to keep TWRP as I install my custom rom. I have the custom rom on an external SD card along with GApps. Should I insert the sd card and then boot to recovery, wipe all data and install from zip on sd card? Is that correct?
2) How do I keep TWRP from not getting overwritten?
Thanks so much for the help. Really appreciate it after a weekend of terror.
I backed up the EFS portion and it wrote it to the internal storage of the phone I believe... data/TWRP something. I did not have my external card in when I did that. Is that the correct way and how would I access that backup if I needed to?
Sorry for the questions. Trying to learn without running in circles.
After I backed up the EFS it also asked me to install SuperSU and I did that - then it rebooted automatically.
If you flash twrp and then just boot the phone to the rom, the boot process will restore stock recovery. If you flash twrp, you need to boot into twrp before booting the stock room for the first time after flashing twrp.
Copy files to internal memory or sd card. If using an sd card, place card into the phone, boot to twrp, and flash.
If twrp doesn't detect root, it will try to root the phone for you. I always choose no so I can flash supersu.
Btw, upgrade to 2.8.7.1 as you may get errors because the recovery is too old.
While in twrp, connect the phone to the computer and use explorer to drag and drop the twrp backup files to your computer.
audit13 said:
If you flash twrp and then just boot the phone to the rom, the boot process will restore stock recovery. If you flash twrp, you need to boot into twrp before booting the stock room for the first time after flashing twrp.
Copy files to internal memory or sd card. If using an sd card, place card into the phone, boot to twrp, and flash.
If twrp doesn't detect root, it will try to root the phone for you. I always choose no so I can flash supersu.
Btw, upgrade to 2.8.7.1 as you may get errors because the recovery is too old.
While in twrp, connect the phone to the computer and use explorer to drag and drop the twrp backup files to your computer.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm not sure if I can post links due to the new account, but the latest files for me are found on dl.twrp.me/jfltecan/ and the only tar image is twrp-2.8.4.0-jfltecan.tar
I will have to go over your other comments on my own to see the functionality. As of now, this is what I have:
1) Stock firmware
2) TWRP installed
3) TWRP asked if I wanted to root (I said yes, figuring that's what you meant)
4) TWRP installed SuperSu and rebooted
5) I downloaded Root Checker and it verified root.
I did just test it by powering off phone and then booting into recovery. Teamwin came up - so I assume that it's all working correctly and the stock ROM did not overwrite anything?
Questions:
1) Now I can boot into recovery mode and install the custom ROM via a zip file on sdcard?
2) Do I install GApps via recovery mode after I install a custom ROM?
3) Should I wipe/format before installing and if so, which one - "Advanced" or "Format" buttons?
I did a factory reset via TWRP then installed the custom ROM. Seems to be working quite well. Maybe I will try it a couple times in order to get the hang of it.
In order to determine that TWRP is the default recovery - it should load when I go into recovery mode correct?
If the phone boots to twrp once, it should not revert to stock recovery in the future.
Is there a stable ROM for a S4 i337m that is newer? I'm having some trouble finding a solid list that is known to work. I don't want to install a wrong version and mess up. I did try the "broken" ROM but 50% of time when someone phones me, they can't hear me speaking so I'm going to have to go back to stock firmware for now.
You could try ROMs made for the 9505 and i337.

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