Database Users

[Q] Galaxy S4 died after 4.3 update

heya guys,
I'm on stock FW on my GS4S i9505 and yesterday morning i update to 4.3 OTA.
It was working all day just fine without issues or lag for the matter.
Today morning when i woke up, my phone was plugged into the charger and was turned off.
I turned it on by couple of mins later it would freeze and wont unlock, just black screen with a red light flashing on the top left of the phone.
I had to pull out the battery and put it back everytime i wanted to try and boot it.
I did that 3 times within 10mins and the 4th time it just stopped turning on all together.
Anyone has this issue and maybe can give tips on how to fix this if possible?
Thanks in advance.

re: auto updates
Smokie Smokerson said:
heya guys,
I'm on stock FW on my GS4S i9505 and yesterday morning i update to 4.3 OTA.
It was working all day just fine without issues or lag for the matter.
Today morning when i woke up, my phone was plugged into the charger and was turned off.
I turned it on by couple of mins later it would freeze and wont unlock, just black screen with a red light flashing on the top left of the phone.
I had to pull out the battery and put it back everytime i wanted to try and boot it.
I did that 3 times within 10mins and the 4th time it just stopped turning on all together.
Anyone has this issue and maybe can give tips on how to fix this if possible?
Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You will need to go to SamMobile.com and download the official odin flash firmware
for your phone's exact model and flash it using Odin.
That will get the phone into good working condition with the stock 4.2 firmware.
After that you can use the phones built-in updating system again and most likely it
will work just fine. Just be sure that the battery is at least half full before the phone
starts the auto-update process.
Perhaps you installed some app or game from the playstore which did not play nice
with your phone and caused the 4.3 update to get stuck or it could have been the
battery if it did not have enough charge in it.
You should try to get the phone into download mode to see if it can be Odin flashed.
Hold the volume down key at the same time while holding the the power key down
for 20-30 seconds and see if it goes into download mode.
If it does you have nothing to worry about.
NOTE: before trying download mode be sure to remove the battery for 5 seconds
and replace it, making sure the phone is in a power off state before trying to boot
it into download mode.

Misterjunky said:
You will need to go to SamMobile.com and download the official odin flash firmware
for your phone's exact model and flash it using Odin.
That will get the phone into good working condition with the stock 4.2 firmware.
After that you can use the phones built-in updating system again and most likely it
will work just fine. Just be sure that the battery is at least half full before the phone
starts the auto-update process.
Perhaps you installed some app or game from the playstore which did not play nice
with your phone and caused the 4.3 update to get stuck or it could have been the
battery if it did not have enough charge in it.
You should try to get the phone into download mode to see if it can be Odin flashed.
Hold the volume down key at the same time while holding the the power key down
for 20-30 seconds and see if it goes into download mode.
If it does you have nothing to worry about.
NOTE: before trying download mode be sure to remove the battery for 5 seconds
and replace it, making sure the phone is in a power off state before trying to boot
it into download mode.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks for the reply dude.
I'd love to do that, but i dont see how this is possible since the phone doesnt boot up at all anymore.
Any ideas?

Maybe your battery is dead? Because it's known issue on Galaxy S4 phones.

Try another charger.

I tried with my wife's S4 battery and my colleague's S4 battery.
Also tried with 3 different charges that came with the S4, no dice... :/
I had to take it back to the store, it was under warranty still.. they are sending it back to Samsung and will get it back in 2-3 weeks, same phone repaired or a refurb i guess.
After doing more search and with the help of some falks from #Android @ EFNET, we came to the conclusion that its an issue with the EMMC chip just like the first generation of Note 2 and S3.
What's pissing me off is that Samsung fixed the issue on Note 2 with a new patch of phones, so newer phones didnt have the EMMC issue as far as i can tell. SO why the hell would they still use it for the S4 is beyond me.
Just a word of advice, if this happens to anyone, make sure you run a backup as soon as it boots back up the first time.
In my case, it booted 3 times by removing the battery and putting it back and froze 3 times, there was no 4th.
If i tried to backup the phone the first or second time it booted, i could still have my data to be restored on the new repaired phone.
This should be marked as closed unless some other people with the same issue want to discuss it here.

[Q] Unique / Strange power button malfunction, also causing wi-fi problems.

OK, here's an interesting problem... My phone can turn on fine, but once it's on the power button refuses to lock the screen. If I long press the power button, it acts normally by bringing up the power down / reboot menu. Not only this but somehow it is also linked to my wifi to get stuck on "Checking the quality of your wifi connection". The first time it happened, I took off my case, removed my s-pen and it suddenly worked again, and at the exact same time the wifi kicked right in as usual and all worked fine again. I assumed my case was putting pressure on the button yet the next time I restarted my phone (incidentally my case was already off) the same problem happened. Power button wouldn't lock screen but long press functioned fine, wifi stuck. I figured maybe my s-pen being taken out may somehow so something, trying to recreate the solution that worked the first time around, but it didn't work. About 10 seconds later I tried the lock button and it worked, and subsequently the wifi kicked in again. I haven't done a factory reset or tried a restore yet, I was hoping to avoid that if possible... just wanted to see if anyone had any ideas as to what could cause something so strange. I don't see any link between the power button and wifi functioning.
My phone is a T-Mobile Note 3, stock KK rom, stock kernel
rooted.
I appreciate any insight, advice, or opinions anyone may give me. Thank you for taking the time out of your day to read about my issue!

Galaxy S5 AT&T SM-G900A will not power on AT ALL

Hey guys,
Some how my phone got a virus and I believe the virus has completely wiped the stock rom. Last night, I took it to the AT&T store, they were able to boot into download mode. It gave a warning saying a custom rom could break installed apps or something.
They gave it back to me, and I figured I could just reflash the rom since it was somewhat bootable, so I turned the phone off until I got home.
Once I got home, I tried booting into download and the phone isn't responding at all. I've tried all of the button combinations, tried a different battery, tried charging over night. Nothing has worked. After a while last night, I was able to get a vibrate and the screen would flash a 1px line across the screen and turn back off. This morning however, I am not getting anything.
Not sure if there is anything I could do at this point. Hoping someone has a way to force download through the computer or something. Never had any problems with viruses, always been cautious. Its really frustrating. I know viruses can be really nasty, but can it seriously delete everything including kernal or Samsung's bios?
Thanks for the help, don't think I have any options but hoping someone is a wizard and can help.

Phone randomly locks itself

Hi guys
I recently bought an OnePlus 2. With the original firmware, I experienced a very strange and very annoying issue: My screen randomly turned off (e.g. during a chat in WhatsApp). The screen turns off and I have to turn it on again by pressing the power button. Then I enter my PIN to access my phone again and it locks AGAIN. This happens like 10 times in a row, then I have to reboot the phone and it was OK again. I seriously don't know what triggered this issue.
However, recently I got pissed of because I tried to call one of my customers and as soon as I entered my PIN and tried to open the phone app, the screen locked again and I almost threw away my phone. Damned troll.
So I decided to try another ROM as I thought it was an OS-related issue. Now I'm running Exodus Android 6.0.1. I did a clean install and guess what: The issue came back on this ROM...
In my opinion there's only something both installations (my previous 5.1.1 stock ROM and my current 6.0.1 ROM) have in common: I've been using XPosed with Amplify, Greenify and XPrivacy. Other than that, I have no idea what it might be.
Have you encountered the same or a similar issue? If so, were you able to solve it? How did you solve it?
I just uninstalled Amplify, as I think it stops somehow the Gyroscope service, that's why it locks randomly. I'll check if the issue appears again...

I think I have good news for you guys: I guess I was able to locate the issue.
I noticed it always happened when I was holding the phone in the hand I had a ring on my finger. Then I found out the phone has magnetic sensors (for flip covers).
I downloaded the Xposed module "Magnet Sensor Control", the bug hasn't appeared so far!
I hope I was able to help you guys with my findings. This thread may be closed now.

S5 SM-G900F : Black screen/Boot loop; Help?

tl;dr at the bottom
Alright so I'm out of ideas on how to fix this phone, couple of days ago my mom came to me complaining that her S5 was giving her trouble. When she handed me the phone, it was in a bootloop of showing the Samsung Galaxy S5 screen, playing the theme and vibrating afterwards then rebooting. I took out the battery and tried to power it on, it ended up successfully booting into android. So from here, I figured there must have been some malware on the device, I downloaded Malwarebytes from the Google Play Store and ran a scan on the device. However in the middle of scanning, the device turned off it's screen and rebooted. (Malwarebytes found 2 malware on the device at that point) So now I'm convinced it's most likely malware and eventually removed all the detected malware on the device. I gave it back to my mom thinking it was fixed.
Moments later she came back saying that it's still giving issues, my first thought "wdf, it was working wasn't it?". I looked at the phone again, and tried to wake up the device using the power button. The 2 soft keys at the bottom lit up however the screen was still black. At this point, the phone was still working fine, the only issue was the screen wouldn't wake up. So I decided to do a battery pull once again to reboot it and it results in the bootloop once again. I did some googling and found various solutions to this, one of them involved wiping the cache from recovery, so it tried it. Booted into recovery and wiped the partition cache (i think that was it), after it wiped and was about to reboot, I noticed a brief "error icon" just before it rebooted. After this point I could not boot into recovery at all (it would just show a black screen and I would assume that the phone turned off) and it was still in a bootloop. It was only after trying to turn on the phone after trying to boot into recovery that the idea of the phone wasn't off and the screen was just black entered my mind. (Because usually if the phone is off, you can turn it on by holding the power button, the phone would not turn on until after a battery pull)
So at this point, it was late at night and I was tired. I left the battery out and just went to bed. The next day I tried to turn it on again and to my surprise it booted up fine but I was skeptical. I had a theory that the device would work fine as long as the screen remained on, so I set the screen timeout to 10 minutes and kept it on for probably 30 minutes while I continued to google. Since it stayed working during that period of time, I thought perhaps locking the device triggers the issue. I turned of "Power Button instantly locks device" and proceeded to turn off the screen using the power button. When I tried to turn it on, it was back to the same problem (black screen, device is working fine, soft keys lit up). I did a battery pull once again in an attempt to reboot and now it was back to problem #2 (boot loop, can't enter recovery). At this point in time, I considered doing a factory reset but since I couldn't enter recovery, I'd most likely have to re-flash the stock firmware.
Since I didn't have much experience flashing android devices (I personally only flashed 2 or 3 devices ever, all of them were successful but I still didn't really trust myself), I had it sent to a local cellphone company and had them try to fix it. Eventually I got the device back, but they were unable to fix the problem (they tried to flash a stock and custom rom). Now I'm back to square 1, the phone is still in a bootloop, no sound, no vibration this time, I don't have much experience with phones since I've only owned 2 in my life. The phone seems to be soft bricked pretty good, I've still got 1 more trick to try (full stock firmware flash) before I call it quits, any ideas?
tl;dr
- device is stuck in a bootloop (issue 1)
- i was able to enter recovery mode once, now it's not accessible
- download mode is accessible
- the device has been able to boot successfully a couple times, but then it has another issue.
- device's screen would not wake up after turning off, softkeys still worked, everything else still worked. (issue 2)
- the device was sent to a local phone repair company to fix (unsuccessful)
- currently device is stuck on issue 1
additional notes
- device has not been dropped or wet
- device has been owned for more than a year without problems
- this problem was recent (3 days)
- no sd card
- dark screen was turned off
theories
- screen could be malfunctioning or defective somehow, but then if it can show the bootscreen and download mode screen fine it seems unlikely also since it's been working fine for over a year
- it's a software issue of some sort, but has already been flashed by local phone repair to no success, then again I'm assuming they just did a basic recovery flash and called it quits