Reocurring Boot Loops, Hardware? - Galaxy S 5 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting

Hey all! I'm having a strange issue regarding boot looping that I can't seem to find an answer to on here or anywhere else, I hope you guys can help.
So my T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy S5 (SM-G900T), purchased in May 2014, while perusing Facebook the other day, randomly shut down in the middle of perfectly normal use and started bootlooping. I had never had the problem before. The device had been rooted for months (I forget what method I used) but it was running a stock Lollipop rom. The first thing I did was factory wipe and cache wipe through Android stock recovery. It worked!... for a couple hours. Then the bootloop started again.
I went and sought a new stock rom, believing that somehow mine had been corrupted, and flashed it via Odin. I also flashed TWRP. Clean wipes, new rom, dalvic/etc. wipes, and booted into stock Marshmallow. It worked!... for a couple hours. Then it started bootlooping again. I went into TWRP and tried to wipe just caches and whatnot, but it wouldn't start again. Long battery pulls sometimes allowed the phone to boot, but it started looping again after ~5-10 minutes.
So I installed the Twisted Lollipop but couldn't even get that to boot. I went back and found the earliest available firmware for my device (as I bought mine right after it came out) and flashed it. Wipe wipe flash wipe whatever, and a succesful boot. It was looking good! I was able to install a number of OTA updates. I was at Android 5.1 when I decided to call it a night and hold off on the further OTAs for today. Today I got up and got ready for work, all's well. As I'm getting ready to leave, I allow Google to update some apps, and begin installing Facebook, Spotify, Cap Metro (for my area's public transit system) and maybe something else, I don't remember. Anyway, as the updates are downloading or installing and I'm checking my email, boom, crash, bootloop.
What's going on here? I've never heard of hardware causing boot loops, but could it be that? I dropped my phone (although protected by a Spigen case) earlier this summer and it cracked the screen-- could it have messed with the motherboard in some substantial way? I had noticed it getting hotter and the battery lasting less than usual, but I attributed that to the device's age.
Any help, any advice, any direction you could give would be extremely appreciated. I don't have the capital to replace the phone right now, and I use it all the time. Thanks folks!

Related

[Q] Fastboot flashing stock didn't fix bootloop?

TL;DR: I have flashed the stock 4.2.1 image through fastboot, and yet my n7 wifi still reboots continuously at the google screen with the little unlocked lock.
Background: I have had the device for about 3 months, no real problems with it before this. I was reading yesterday night and i fell asleep, and thus instead of being on my desk all night the device was under a blanket. When i woke up, I opened the cover and found it on the google screen with the lock. It was warm, but not incredibly so. I thought it was weird that it had rebooted and apparently frozen, but i held down the power to turn it off. when i turned it back on, it started the google screen, then went black, then started the google screen again. Seems like there may be some sort of a kernel issue that is keeping it from booting. The next thing i did was to go into recovery (had CWM at this point, and it was rooted as well but that's a moot point if i can't get into the system.) and i did a backup, then wiped data and did a restore from the backup that i had just made. after rebooting, it made it all the way into the system, and seemed ok. I set it down, and a few moments later it turned off and started doing the loopy google screen thing again. Next, I went into recovery and wiped data/factory reset, and tried to boot up. no luck, still looping. Next, i grabbed the 4.0 toolkit from the dev section and tried to flash the stock recovery from that, but it was proving troublesome so i just downloaded the image myself and fastbooted then replaced cwm with the stock recovery, wiped everything, and flashed the 4.2.1 image. that should have worked, from what i understand, but no, still being loopy. I re-wiped and flashed, tried 4.1.2 instead, that didn't work, and i re-did 4.2.1. after flashing 4.2.1 and then leaving it boot looping for a little while, i noticed that it sometimes made it into the boot animation and then the animation froze and it rebooted and looped more. after a few more tries, powering it off, leaving it for a few min, and powering it on again, it booted all the way to the welcome screen to pick a language and then froze. some number of loops later, it made it all the way to picking a wifi network and froze. I have yet to make it past that point. Thinking it may help, i fastbooted CWM onto the device, so i have a more capable recovery now. I am now going to look into pushing a non stock rom to the device to see if that will help at all.
Any ideas on what on earth could have caused this? Was it just that the device was a little warmer than usual for a while?
Any ideas on how i can fix this? Much appreciated!
Lastly, should i consider looking at sending it back to google? I didn't think there was anything wrong with the hardware, but i'm not sure.
Thanks!
Update: After leaving the system repeating it's loopy boot thing for about 45 min, it seems to have finally booted into the system, and has yet to reboot again. I have no idea why this happened in the first case, nor why this finally worked in the end, but so far it seems ok.
More: Ok, so it still seems to be looping a lot. I have no idea why still. I'm having trouble getting it to boot back into the system, so hopefully something helps fix this.
Ok, so a day later it seems to have settled down such that there's very little looping on the google logo screen any more; now it just tends to randomly reboot when in use. this is quite frustrating, but seems more similar to what others have reported to be the case with 4.2.1. oddly, i never had these reboot issues before it decided to fail the first time, so i'm not sure if this is just because ii'm on 4.2.1. I may look at flashing back to 4.1.2 and staying there, i suppose it can't hurt. does anyone else have any ideas as to what could be going on?

[Q] Persistent bootloops

Hi folks.
So after a sleepless night and a lot of guessing and clicking around with no luck, I finally decided to ask for help.
The story:
Yesterday, I decided to open up my lovely N4 to perform the thermal pad mod (that can be found on these forums), as it was going really hot around the CPU at time and it seemed like a good solution.
Now, I'm no stranger to disassembling microelectronics without breaking them (few weeks ago, I successfully resoldered a broken power button in my old T989 that I've been using before N4).
What couldn't let me sleep at night:
And here is where the problem emerged. After re-assembling my sweet little phone (yes, i did it perfectly right), I tried to boot up and all i could see was an endless and really annoying bootloop, but as the device booted up, I did not worry much. While doing some research, I read that there's people experiencing bootloops with 4.3, so I thought that after disconnecting the battery, it just might've had happened on its own (I was using stock 4.3 with faux kernel before the nightmare started)
At this point, I booted into recovery and tried to flash the rom over, but unfortunately nothing positive happened. Then I tried factory reset and flashing different roms, also with no luck. This is when things started to get really frustrating, as no matter what I flashed, the bootloop was (and is) still there. But then I tries to restore a backup that I did right after getting my N4, back in November, and it WORKED. Why do i still have a problem then? Because it was 4.1 and OTA was giving me error every time I wanted to flash the update, so I kept flashing till i get some results. And then one of the N4 toolkits wiped my entire internal memory and I ended up with only being able to use sideload. Then I tried ALL of the N4 toolkits that can be found in here, to wipe everything and bring my phone back to everything stock, but the bootloader is locked so it cant do it, and it cant unlock it because I cant boot into the system.
Conclusion:
The phone works fine, and it proved it. But no matter what I try to flash (other than the old backup), the persistent bootloop is still there smiling at me like an a****le.
Any ideas?

G2 hardware issues, possibly related to flashing?

My G2 has been acting really funky lately, hanging on boot and not being able to "hold" recovery flashes. I'll start from the beginning of my little story.
On Saturday, I wanted to do a nandroid backup from TWRP (not sure which version, an older one but not terribly old). It failed several times. I went back into the OS (CM 12.1) and backed up all apps and app data to an OTG USB via Titanium Backup. This was successful. I tried to go back into TWRP a second time. Nothing. Recovery is not even there, I get a security error from what I believe is fastboot. I went back to CM and tried to re-flash TWRP. Now I get a security error on the LG screen. Nothing would boot, no recovery mode, I did have download mode although I had no PC with me so I didn't know this at the time. I was away last weekend so I had to go without a phone for a day... which was actually... kind of pleasent. Don't ask me why I carried two 32GB USBs and an OTG adapter on my keychain but no laptop, because I have no idea why I would do this, lol.
Came home Sunday afternoon and decided to nuke the whole phone with a TOT flash. Since I always wanted to try CloudyG2 since we all know AOSP-based ROMs don't do the camera justice, I went ahead and TOT flashed, re-rooted, re-AutoRec, etc. Everything worked wonderfully; I did a full wipe in TWRP, flashed in Cloudy, then the KK radio, then Xposed. Played around with things like XCam and a few Xposed modules. Everything was working awesome, so I did my restore in Titanium. Took a few hours, but Titanium says everything went fine (sans for a few CM apps which did not restore by design I guess). I checked out a few apps, all my data is there, wonderful. Titanium told me to restart so after poking around a bit, I went for the restart. Hang on boot. For several hours. Tried to go to recovery, fastboot security error. Seems it can't "hold" recovery or something else that I'm flashing?
Clearly I am doing something incorrect here with flashing and all that, but I can't figure out what. I'm not new to flashing and modding, and I've flashed regular CM updates and other goodies onto this G2 for quite a while with no issues. I'm going through the same steps I would normally with CM, and I've had plenty of success with that. Any ideas what I am doing wrong here?
Had same issue and know I hard bricked it trying to get it fixed ... Off to a different phone I guess .. Not sure why it wouldn't hold a recovery either after a few hours ... I gave up .. Good luck
Sent from my SCH-I535 using XDA Premium 4 mobile app

Massive softbrick (haven't found a solution yet)

Hello everyone,
So here's my story: I got a 6P short after release and it's been amazing. After switching from a S6 I couldn't be happier until 3 days ago.
I was playing around with my phone (checking for updates on the play store if I recall correctly) and I was going to switch from 4g to wifi. I went ahead and pulled down my notification shade and went to press WiFi but misclicked and hit Hotspot which was below it. My phone suddenly froze big time and this is for the first time ever since purchase.
At first I thought I'd wait it out since the device was completely unresponsive, home button didn't work and neither did anything on screen. Buttons didn't make a difference either. 10 minutes went by and I ended up force restarting by holding down power + volume up. First part of my bootup went fine but when it got to the android boot animation after I put in my pin to allow the device to start it dropped from the smooth usual framerate down to 1 frame every 10-15 seconds and it slowed down further until it came to a complete halt around the time the android letters appear.
My first thought was corrupt rom so I went ahead and wiped data from the stock recovery. I was running completely stock with no modifications whatsoever. That didn't do anything. Phone still froze in the same boot phase. Desperate I unlocked bootloader to flash a clean fresh image to try to fix it and to my surprise that didn't change a thing.
As I was getting pretty desperate already I had one more idea and that was to flash up to the Dev preview. To my huge surprise it booted and I jumped from excitement. So I started setting up my phone again. I got past the prompt to insert sim card and I was now at the screen to choose a wifi network. As soon as I clicked into that the phone froze up again and at that point I lost all hope.
I wiped data in stock recovery and shut the phone down for the night. On day 3, today I woke up and tried starting the phone and it worked as if nothing had happened. I went through the setup and set up my phone on the N preview. At a certain point I was planning to go back to the latest official build but for now I was happy my phone was back from the dead. Later today I tried to restart my phone to clear all running apps etc and it froze up on boot.
I'm losing all hope that I'll be resolving this myself so I'm reaching out to the community to see if anyone's had this happen to them before and hopefuly for a solution. It's still under warranty so I can eventually send it back to the retailer but I'd rather not have a phone for 3 weeks.
Any and all help is appreciated.
Thank you for reading through my long and probably pretty boring story!
Have you tried flashing the factory image? If yes, did you made sure to wipe/erase the system, boot, vendor, and cache partition before flash the corresponding img files?
To the OP, is there any reason you did not flash to release version 6 instead of Dev preview ?
Also, any reason you can not simply do the "unenroll" from https://www.google.com/android/beta ?
It will require you to setup certain settings again as you will be back to a "factory reset".
DJBhardwaj said:
Have you tried flashing the factory image? If yes, did you made sure to wipe/erase the system, boot, vendor, and cache partition before flash the corresponding img files?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
DJBhardwaj, i haven't specifically erased those partitions. I was under the impression wipe userdata along with reflashing did that. I will try that tonight when I get home!
Xdafly, I only updated up to N as a last resort because at first I had a locked BL. I was planning to unenrol but that would've been too late as it self bricked after a restart.
DJBhardwaj said:
Have you tried flashing the factory image? If yes, did you made sure to wipe/erase the system, boot, vendor, and cache partition before flash the corresponding img files?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well I just did the erase thingy and my phone booted but wifi won't turn on. Enabling hotspot doesn't brick anymore but I now suspect WiFi might've been the issue. Any tips on how to find out what it could be and possibly fix it?
Edit: 2 restarts and a factory reset later I'm back to bricked same way as before.
try safe mode
mr.dj26 said:
try safe mode
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That was my first thought, that was the restart that bricked it again. Safe mode shouldn't have made a difference since I hadn't even logged into Google account for apps.
After reading the very first post; sounds like bad WiFi hardware.
All the hanging has been related to WiFi or Hotspot.
I think you should get a replacement
Sent from my Purified NexusixP
If Someone Helped You Then Dont Just say Thanks...Hit The Thanks Button!
Is your phone rooted and did you install Xposed?
Over the weekend I shutdown my 6p (stock rooted with April security patch, Xposed v80) and charged it. When it turned it back up I kept getting "Unfortunately, nfc service has stopped". Long story short: I ended up factory reset my phone and reinstalled EVERYTHING and I still got into bootloop. Then I came across
https://github.com/rovo89/Xposed/issues/113
https://github.com/rovo89/android_art/issues/28
At the end of the second post rovo89 (developer of Xposed) fixed the bug in V83. I wiped my 6p once more and installed everything with v83. Problem solved.
Good luck!

ASUS Zenfone 2 Laser (ZE551KL) - Gets to boot logo and than restarts after 10 seconds

Hey there,
I am having a recent issue with my phone, where everytime I reset it or do a power off and reboot, the phone will constantly get to the boot logo (in this case cyangemod) and reboot after 5-10 seconds.
It ends up working but only when I let it do this cycle for about 30 minutes or so.
I have looked everywhere, I cannot find someone who is having a similar problem as me.
I am running the latest Cyangemod nightly rom, because I thought the issue was the ASUS rom, I have tried wiping cache, doing a factory reset etc... but no luck.
I also have the latest TWRP recovery and unlocked bootloader.
Any help would be gladly appreciated, Thank You.
Let me know if any video evidence is needed to further clarify, the problem I am having.
Fa7aLX__x said:
Hey there,
I am having a recent issue with my phone, where everytime I reset it or do a power off and reboot, the phone will constantly get to the boot logo (in this case cyangemod) and reboot after 5-10 seconds.
It ends up working but only when I let it do this cycle for about 30 minutes or so.
I have looked everywhere, I cannot find someone who is having a similar problem as me.
I am running the latest Cyangemod nightly rom, because I thought the issue was the ASUS rom, I have tried wiping cache, doing a factory reset etc... but no luck.
I also have the latest TWRP recovery and unlocked bootloader.
Any help would be gladly appreciated, Thank You.
Let me know if any video evidence is needed to further clarify, the problem I am having.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Sorry I don't have good news or a solution for you. Just wanted to chime in that you aren't alone. This randomly happened to me on Sunday in the car - I noticed that I suddenly had no signal in a pretty well developed area that I frequent, so I tried restarting and I've been down ever since. Unlike you, I didn't wait it out too long, maybe 5 minutes at the most, when the phone started to get warm.
I have tried going back to stock recovery and firmware and have seen no success. Contrary to other people reporting problems, I hadn't done anything to my phone leading up to this. I think I upgraded the modem several days before, but other than that, everything was running pretty smoothly.
same thing was happening to me after a bad flash. Stock recovery, stock lolipop, wipe data and cache, boot once, reboot to recovery, flash latest MM package on asus's site.
This is the only thing that fixed the bootloops.

Categories

Resources