Interesting story regarding a Fascinate I bought off craigslist... - Fascinate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting

I bought a fascinate from good ol craiglist for a friend. When I bought it I noticed the original user had already rooted it and installed CM7.
Because I didnt know what he had done to it I decided to start from scratch and used Odin and flashed powerwashed_20_b3_Full_ec09modem and the atlas_v2.2.2.pit
After that I flashed cwm4_fixed_for_cm7-ODIN.tar and began getting ICS on this baby (teamhacksung-ota-eng.BUILD2.zip followed by build 11 at the time).
Everything was gravy and I gave the phone to my friend who was a happy panda. Several weeks later he calls and tells me the phone is stuck in recovery, I assume he borked something so I headed over thinking I will just Nandroid the ICS ROM that I set up before I gave it to him.
Funny thing was after rebooting from the Nandroid, the phone goes back to recovery! I was a little confused but assumed that maybe the Nandroid went bad when I backed it up. So I decided to just reflash build 11 again, after the flash was successful i reboot and.... back to recovery?
At this point I was pretty confused, CWM appeared to be working but it wasnt. Nothing was working, not even flashing CM7. The only way I got it to work again was to Odin the powerwashed_20_b3_Full_ec09modem and the atlas_v2.2.2.pit again. So that was what I did and got him back to ICS (build 13 this time).
Thinking it was a freak occurence I didnt pay it any mind, until he called me again several weeks later saying its stuck in CWM again!? So I check it out and sure enough it keeps booting to recovery and not able to nandroid or flash anything (even tho it says it does successfully).
At this point I assume its a hardware issue but dont understand what exactly, I bought another on craiglist and will swap with him and further investigate the issue.
I looked around the forums to see if anyone had a similar issue but have not seen anything like this. Anyone have any ideas??

This is most likely caused by doing the three finger reboot on the newer ICS roms. Tell them to pull the battery instead the next time their phone locks up. Also, there is boot loop breaker in the development section.
Sent from my SCH-I500 using xda premium

I assumed that as well, however my friend has no experience with these devices and would never hold down all three buttons for any reason. Both times he had reported that the phone randomly went into recovery on its own.
He could be BSing me of course, but I'll be testing it when I get it back tomorrow and see if I can recreate the scenario.
But I will be including the boot loop breaker file in the SD card and see if that at least makes this phone usable again instead of having to use ODIN every time. So thanks for that info!

Check kernel settings. Sleep Of Death, maybe?

Related

Need Pro Help Here, HW Issues or SW issues with this Phone

OK, Heres the scenario, This is a replacement T-959 vibrant, sent from either TMO or Samsung, really not sure! My 1st phone never had any issues with modding, and always cooperated! Until I used KIES to update one day and It bricked, because of primary and SBL corruptions. [I know!!, found out 5 mins too late about using KIES] Anyway, since Ive had this replacement phone its done nothing but fight me from the start, never has acted right I think and I feel there's something wrong HW wise with it. My problem with it now, is it wont accept any other custom ROM I try to install, and only works with either 2.1 or 2.2 stock OEM ROM's. Meaning, Anything else ROM wise, It wont go past the last part of boot sequence, and just keeps looping, and does it over and over again! Ive tried all of Simple Honeys, Toxic 8's Roms, and each time it goes thru the loading successfully, and then starts it boot-up, but every single Flash Ive done, ROM wise, it hangs up and loops at the very last part of booting up. Ive come to realize now, it isn't the ROMS, but the phone " I THINK" Each time I tried a Custom ROM install, I started with stock fresh JFD install, and wiped and cleared out everything before starting another ROM install, but with each attempt that I try to go past anything other than Froyo stock, It does this boot loop problem at the final part!! It seems like who ever sent it to me, did something to the phone to prevent this. Modding it I mean. like right now I'm on Eugenes Froyo, with the 2E RECOVERY, It was working fine, until I upgraded the Eugenes kernel, which is suppose to work with this ROM, technically the phone still runs, but as soon as I did this, I now cant get into the two drives as mass storage to tranfer files, says insert disk, like as if its a CD Rom drive, WTF!! And like I said, this phone wont accept any other ROMS now, past stock Eclair or Froyo OEM and kernels as well. I don't understand what the problem is, My guess is they flashed something to prevent modding or its just a corrupted HW issue, anybody ever seen this before. I wish I had just JTAG'd my first phone with Josh over at Mobile Tech, and saved myself all this heartbreak and frustration, but its too late for that now! So anyway, I need to determine for sure if this phones screwed, HW wise or if there is SW to get this phone straighten out, to where it'll work right like my first one used to, and begin to accept custom ROM's like it should be able to do!! I'm at my last end with this phone, and I'm desperate to get a solid reason/answer for whats happening here, because Ive followed all the instructions and standard procedures to insure that all the attempted installs of the ROMS I mentioned go correctly. And its boiling down to either HW issues or a SW issue they created before they shipped it to me, or last but least hopefully a SW fix here, that can get the HW/phone to act right again, and maybe salvage this phone, otherwise I'm thinking I need to buy another brand new phone and hope for the best. I just don't want to be stuck and limited with Froyo stock, for the rest of my time using this phone, I want my freedom to choose again, like I had before, and also It ran so much better than OEM anyways!
Go back to stock using the sticky on the q&a then root using that same methOd and when you flash a custom room make sure you wipe dalvik and cache and delete user data
Sent from my SGH-T959 using XDA App
Quote" Go back to stock using the sticky on the q&a then root using that same methOd and when you flash a custom room make sure you wipe dalvik and cache and delete user data"
If you had picked up on it in my post, have already done this dozens of times!! Oh and BTW, when at JFD = 2.1 Eclair, it wont allow the 2 drives access to in Cabled USB mass storage, and therefore unable to CWM flash with zips, then I must go to 2.2 Froyo next to be able to get past that problem, but again when I go from there to any custom ROM, it fails to boot at the very end, and starts its looping. Again, the 1st phone I had, never ever, behaved like this!! Same phone but, different dates of manufacturing and also this one came from either Samsung or TMO in Plano,TX where that's all, they do is send out phones for replacement, and this one wasn't in a original box, something they worked on, grabbed off the shelf, and sent to me!! Its just a shame that 99% of all the ROMS are in zipped form, instead of TAR files, at least then I could've tried flashing some of them from, Eclair to see if that made a difference, but when they are zipped, you must use CWM recovery to flash, and thus again presents another problem as far as what I'm going thru here!
Got any thing else, Idea wise, that actually hasn't been tried yet, that makes sense??
OK, Ive made some progress, It seems for whatever stupid reason, that unlocking my phone, [jailbreaking] was the culprit of this phones renegade behavior, I simply restored it back to a locked status as a TMO provider, and Wholla, the phones now acting right!! And I have been able to get it to the ROM I wanted and flash a better kernel as well with 0 defects!!! And then I jailbroke it again, and its working flawlessly.
Personally I don't understand why that had a bearing on its behavior, but nun the less it did. And has cause me a few extra wrinkles around my eyes in stress trying to figure this out by myself, especially when all the suggestions and procedures I did was for nothing, until this phone was restored to a locked condition again!!
Go figure Right???? Grrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!! Anyway I hope mentioning this will prevent someone else in losing their hair or sanity!!
hello i think we have the problem, i also have openline my vibrant to be able to use here in our country.. i have 2.1 eclair, i just want to know what 2.2 ROM did you used coz you've said that it's ok to upgrade it to 2.2, but not other ROM, where did you get it.. can you pm me the link
thanks

[Q] AT&T splash screen loop

So, SGH-177 had been rooted and installed CM7, then Unnamed, then AOKP. All were pretty buggy. We wanted to bring it back to factory (with root if possible). Not for a warranty claim, just so it would be somewhat stable.
Anyway, I found a one click ODIN solution for UCKH7 stock. I used that, it passed. then the phone just looped through the AT&T "Rethink Possible" splash screen. I tried to get into recovery mode, but it wouldn't load, so I flashed the Siyah kernel to get CWM on there. Still I can only get into download mode and the phone loops the splash screen.
I hoped that it was just taking some time to load up the first time, so I left it overnight. Still stuck on the splash screen this morning.
I spent hours on here last night and found lots of people saying that if you have access to download mode, or recovery mode, you should be able to fix it. I wasn't able to find any answers as to how.
Help?!
I've had this same problem before. what always fixes it for me is to get into the factory 3e recovery to do a reset. I know you said you couldnt get there but make sure (while the phone is off; remove battery if you have to before this) you are holding down both Volume buttons and the power button at the same time until you see the "Samsung Galaxy SII" screen, then release the buttons.
factory reset, then it should be fine.
If you can't get to recovery, read some more on here. I'm sure something is out there, but I don't know what it is.
Here are two posts that might help you out. I've been doing the same research since my "Oh crap its stuck in a bootloop I'll sell it cheap on eBay" SGII is due to arrive today or tomorrow.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1451590
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1580885
Best of luck to you!
UnNamed buggy?
Out of curiosity how did you root and flash, cause that is probably one of the most stable builds we have with minor changes to stock.
Anyways good luck getting back to stock.
So, for some reason, the next time I tried booting into recovery, it worked. I got a couple errors, but then it booted up just fine. Don't know why it wouldn't get into recovery before.
Everything seems to be working as it should so far.
I'm guessing this may be why some of the threads I had seen didn't really offer a solution. Sometimes it finally works if you just hold your head right.
Thanks all!
Regarding UnNamed... I don't recall the method I used to root, it's been a long time and I've done various work on this (my wife's phone) and my Nexus One. Easy to get it confused. I flashed it through CWM recovery, factory wipe, flash from SD.
It worked fine for a while (a couple months), then it got really glitchy. Unable to answer phone calls, random reboots, etc.
Major Wood said:
I flashed it through CWM recovery, factory wipe, flash from SD.
It worked fine for a while (a couple months), then it got really glitchy. Unable to answer phone calls, random reboots, etc.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Did you also wipe cache and dalvik? May have been the problem...
I don't recall, but would be surprised if I hadn't done that
A year ago. When I first started flashing roms. I spent an entire week just reading the atrix forums and learning. I planned. I schemed. I asked questions. Through pm. And googled a LOT. Then when I had learned enough I did it. Point is....if yer not willing to have patience and learn as much as u can before u jump into this. Then its maybe not for you.
Sent from my SGH-I777 using Tapatalk 2

[Q] Am I bricked?

I recently installed the nightly build of ICS on my samsung vibrant. Today the phone had a error that said encryption cannot be completed phone must be erased. I let it do a factory reset . Then I got stuck in a endless boot cycle showing the vibrant logo and then the cynogen guy for a few seconds then reboot. I could still access the recovery menu but it refused to flash any roms I threw at it. I downloaded and ran odin 1 click recovery and it changed my tmobile phone to a att phone. And it lost the recovery mode. It just shows att screen first then samsung vibrant second and just reboots. I can still get into download mode and flash roms using odin 3 but no matter what rom I select or if I choose repartion or not the flash will go through successfully but then the phone reboots into same problem as before. I suspect the recovery files are gone since no button combination anymore gets me into recovery. Is there anything else I can do?
Man I am having the exact same problem. I really hope someone can figure something out soon. Did yours randomly get that error? Or did you actually try to encrypt your phone?
Sounds like you used the wrong Odin 1 Click. If it installed Captivate bootloaders, that would cause a problem.
This is your best shot I think
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=24418319
Sent from my A500 using Tapatalk 2
It just happened
It happened on its own. Was working fine all day walked in my house as as soon as it hit wifi it started going crazy. I had the data plan turned off months ago. Maybe theres something to it connecting up to the net. I have found out if you install your sim you get a reduced menu of recovery options but without sim it just constantly reboots. it only gives option of reboot, reinstall packages,delete all user data, delete cache data. If you try reinstalling the packages theres nothing there. Deleting caches made no differance. ADB does work and responds while in this lesser form of recovery is there a easy way to use adb to force a full system flash?
Thanks
That link was perfect had a link to eugenes no brick froyo rom which fixed my problem. Dloaded that used its pit and tar files and repartioned and im back to stock. Going back to team whiskeys mod. If all ICS roms has bugs like that is unusable.
bfranklin1986 said:
This is your best shot I think
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=24418319
Sent from my A500 using Tapatalk 2
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Do you have access to BOTH your internal and external SD cards? The Encryption Bug is totally and completely random and does not discriminate. There is currently no known reason or solution. Several of us across a few different devices have been working on this for months.
Consider yourself luck if you have access to both SDs as you are the 2nd person to get in and out today. Many, many others have not been as fortunate.
If you could please pull up this thread and put as much information in there as possible, it would be greatly appreciated. Are you unlocked, what happened right before, what bootloaders are you on, what ROM were you trying to flash, what ROM did you end up getting booted,....those types of things. As much detail as you can muster together, after you catch your breath and relax a minute.
Guys DO NOT run ICS unless you have read up on the Encryption Unsuccessful bug and except the possible consequences! Every ICS T959 rom should have a warning IMO.
There is no known fix > just a work around. Odin / Heimdall / Jtag = useless
Update
I think I might have pulled the trigger to quick. While the link above did give me Eugenes rom which at least got me out of the boot cycle both internal and external sd shows 0 and I am unable to load anything on either card. I have tried differant microsd cards all of them show the same thing. So eugenes rom got me working kind of but cant store anything at all. That sucks loved my vibrant and its almost out of contract and planned on using on prepay.
Agreed 100 %
Had I of known would of stuck around on my team whiskey rom which never gave me any problems. Does this ICS bug affect amazon kindles? Ive put cynogen9 on 2 of them and am wondering if I shouldnt take it off before they turn into paper weights.
Moped_Ryder said:
Guys DO NOT run ICS unless you have read up on the Encryption Unsuccessful bug and except the possible consequences! Every ICS T959 rom should have a warning IMO.
There is no known fix > just a work around. Odin / Heimdall / Jtag = useless
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
chickenmon said:
Had I of known would of stuck around on my team whiskey rom which never gave me any problems. Does this ICS bug affect amazon kindles? Ive put cynogen9 on 2 of them and am wondering if I shouldnt take it off before they turn into paper weights.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I got tagged on a Nook Color with it. BUT, since the Nook Color has a feature that no others I think do (you can boot a ROM straight from an SD card and not mess with the oringinal OS at all), I was able to just pull my Microsd out and reformat it and then put CM7 on it for my wife.
So far from what I have seen and been working on:
Vibrant, Captivate, My wife's Nook Color, A few Transformers, SGSII,...
Anything I can do?
Anything I can do to get my partions right again? I can flash the twm 5.2.2 but none of the roms i throw at it including ics passion stays in a boot cycle. Only rom that works is eugenes froyo that does not brick and it doesnt allow internal or external mem to be seen.
chickenmon said:
... Only rom that works is eugenes froyo that does not brick and it doesnt allow internal or external mem to be seen.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You may want to bring up this issue directly in Merio90's thread. I believe Alex9090 went thru possibly similar issues and may be able to help you in that thread (unless she happens to pop in here).
I'm assuming you were trying to mount sdcard and emmc within recovery first (storage and mounts)? If you do have access to recovery again and can mount the external sdcard, maybe try repartitioning the card within recovery (using the parameters in Merio90's instructions)? Then transfer your rom zip and re-flash.
People have actually flashed Eugene's Froyo post-EU ... but without an ext sdcard. Quite an oddity. It's the only one (AFAIK) that'll fully boot up (even after losing int sdcard access due to EU) yet without an external sdcard in place.
Your assumptions are correct. I cannot mount emmc. I cannot flash any rom via 2.5 or 5.2 recovery only through odin and only eugenes rom still allows phone to boot but no mounting of internal or external sds. Ive spent about 3 days on this. There must be some hardcore adb commands to force a true factory reset partioning and all. Very annoying. Thanks for the help if I find any ways to fix it I will repost it here.
Might be bricked?
Ok, i will admit up front that I probably did something stupid and now am sending out a cry for help. Until yesterday I had ICS 4.0.3 successfully installed. I believe it was Euphoria flavor. But, I constantly had shortage of memory problems with the new force close language on apps running in bg - was laggy. Here is where it all went wrong - Decided to dl and install CM9 nightly to fix my laggy install. Recovery went fine, but rom failed, rebooted and sent error to cm. Tried new tactic - dl and installed Slim ICS - wrong, got stuck in boot loop - but could still get into download mode. Ran Odin to restore to stock. Ran fine but Failed - no explanation, just failed. Since it would not respond, finally turned it off - OFF has now become permanent! Power button does nothing. Charging does not light up screen. No download or recovery mode! Really fearful that this IS bad. Help, help, help!!
Open to suggestion. . .
JIM in FLA
Not related at all to my original problem.
tenantrep said:
Ok, i will admit up front that I probably did something stupid and now am sending out a cry for help. Until yesterday I had ICS 4.0.3 successfully installed. I believe it was Euphoria flavor. But, I constantly had shortage of memory problems with the new force close language on apps running in bg - was laggy. Here is where it all went wrong - Decided to dl and install CM9 nightly to fix my laggy install. Recovery went fine, but rom failed, rebooted and sent error to cm. Tried new tactic - dl and installed Slim ICS - wrong, got stuck in boot loop - but could still get into download mode. Ran Odin to restore to stock. Ran fine but Failed - no explanation, just failed. Since it would not respond, finally turned it off - OFF has now become permanent! Power button does nothing. Charging does not light up screen. No download or recovery mode! Really fearful that this IS bad. Help, help, help!!
Open to suggestion. . .
JIM in FLA
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
First of all, not to sound like a ****; but it's rude to hijack someone elses thread. You should've created your own thread for this.
Second; you might have fried your bootloader which in turn, yeah, that's bad and you might have bricked your phone.
Did you try to boot into recovery via the battery pull method. If not, try that and see how it works. I would link you to the instructions but I'm too lazy and tired right now to search for it and again, this is someone else's thread. Just do a search for it and you should find it.
If you need more help or guidance, create your own thread and start there.
Noticed your running Ice Cream Zenwich rc1.3. How do you like it. Ive installed slim 3 times today and twice I have gotten the encryption error within a hour. Needless to say not impressed major pain in the ass to have to do a million and half tricks with awm, adb, popping sd cards in and out etc.
Update
Also the current build of ics slim does not allow the imei information to be retrieved from sim for tmobile requiring a reflash of the modem. You have to download and install a new modem. I used csm5. The guide on the link in this post dow work but its a real pain and requires lots of trial and error. Wondering if google intentionally bricking these things knowing we all got gadget lust for the sIII now.
chickenmon said:
Noticed your running Ice Cream Zenwich rc1.3. How do you like it ...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
ICZen_rc1.8.3 (AOKP #39, ICS 4.0.4) + subZero #144 (New Test Kernel just released in mr_pyscho's RootzWiki kernel thread) is Linaro infused ... and I've got to say the combo is THE fastest rom experience I've ever had on my Vibe. Whatever MP did in his new test kernel just blows the doors off the previous performance limits.
Btw .. you keep encountering EU again. Really odd unless possibly your external card wasn't partitioned correctly. Not a knock directly on you, but it is a common occurrence lately. FYI, I repartitioned mine directly from recovery.
Also ... Br1cK'd (ICZen) and mr_psycho (subZero) are aware of the EU situation and try to include safeguards in their builds. However, until we know the exact root cause of EU, we're all just shooting in the dark. Imo, it's at least comforting to use a rom & kernel where the dev's are at least mindful of EU.

A problem solved

Hey everyone,
This is for people who are in the situation now.
I recently flashed my Rom to stock JellyBean, just no idea why, I just had the urge to go Stock (non-rooted)
All good, happily did it, no problems at all. The problem I had was when I wanted to flash it back to Rooted Custom Roms.
Now, I used Odin for this, and felt a little too confident, and thought I could do it without problems. Here is what happened...
Open Odin,
Flashed CF-Root SGS3 v6, in PDA, (as it said)
It failed, no idea why, it kept failing on NAND Backup, all the time,
then could not for the hell of it get into Recovery, at all, only the SGSIII logo at the beginning.
So after a hell of alot of research and stress and concentration, I finally figured it out.
I downloaded CF-Insecure-SGS3_XX_NEE_ALE8-v1.2,
flashed that through PDA, then downloaded the Kernel, (Perseus.alpha25.3-i9300)
and also flashed that through PDA, it phone booted passed the SGSIII start logo, and went into Recovery and updated then rebooted, and got stuck on the Logo once again, so I got into Download Mode, flashed through Odin once again, CF-Root-SGS3-v6.0 and it passed the flash.
My Recovery was back, I went into it, and had Paranoid Android Rom on my SD-Card, luckily, and thought what the heck, it aint gonna kill it, and flashed it, and it worked!
Couldn't believe my eyes, after 15 hours and 13 cups of tea and the shakes it booted the the boot screen, and went into the Android and I now!
Finally have my phone back, was so close to giving up, but luckily my Tea kept me going.
Reason I post this is I found it hard to get the information I needed through the web, someone had the same problem but it was always 1 thing different which was a big difference. They had recovery but couldn't do anything.
So here you go everyone. If this helps, then happy days, if not then, good luck and let me know what problem your having.
Very Very eagure to learn the ways of the Android.

[Q] New to posting, not new to the forum

Hi everyone,
I have been frequenting XDA for quite a while. Hugely into android and custom roms and things of the sort, but have never had a real reason to post. I have either been lucky enough to be able to find what I need by searching, or figured it out myself. This time however, I am pretty stumped.
I did a fair amount of research before starting this, and am now seeing that I did not do quite enough. If I am in the wrong place please direct me to a better one.
Here is my issue:
I have an LG g2 that I recently picked up used. Phone has never been rooted or worked on...until now. Decided I would spend my weekend working on it. Successfully rooted, and installed TWRP. Decided to flash a rom, downloaded my rom as I have always done, put it on the sdcard, made a couple of nandroids, and flashed it. Everything seemed ok, booted back up, got the correct boot animation, but it bootlooped. No big deal Im thinking, go back into recovery and wipe a couple times. Still wont boot. Go back in and restore my nandroids, and they wont boot either.
So now I am worried. Try it a coulple more times, and somehow get it to reboot to the setup screen. Wont go past there. Do the trick to avoid it and cant get it to activate. Double check everything, power off, wipe, power back on and now it wont even load to there. I tried sideloading a different rom as well as what seems to be the stock software and nothing. Im lost, I need help. Any advice?
skizzyp said:
Hi everyone,
I have been frequenting XDA for quite a while. Hugely into android and custom roms and things of the sort, but have never had a real reason to post. I have either been lucky enough to be able to find what I need by searching, or figured it out myself. This time however, I am pretty stumped.
I did a fair amount of research before starting this, and am now seeing that I did not do quite enough. If I am in the wrong place please direct me to a better one.
Here is my issue:
I have an LG g2 that I recently picked up used. Phone has never been rooted or worked on...until now. Decided I would spend my weekend working on it. Successfully rooted, and installed TWRP. Decided to flash a rom, downloaded my rom as I have always done, put it on the sdcard, made a couple of nandroids, and flashed it. Everything seemed ok, booted back up, got the correct boot animation, but it bootlooped. No big deal Im thinking, go back into recovery and wipe a couple times. Still wont boot. Go back in and restore my nandroids, and they wont boot either.
So now I am worried. Try it a coulple more times, and somehow get it to reboot to the setup screen. Wont go past there. Do the trick to avoid it and cant get it to activate. Double check everything, power off, wipe, power back on and now it wont even load to there. I tried sideloading a different rom as well as what seems to be the stock software and nothing. Im lost, I need help. Any advice?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
would really like someone to chime in...running linux.
Bump. Can anyone give me any advice?
skizzyp said:
Bump. Can anyone give me any advice?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Sounds like you need to restock and start over. I'd give you links but how to do so varies by which version or carrier the phone is from.

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