An adventure with rooting and flashing and wi-fi problems. - Verizon Samsung Galaxy S 4

I thought it was time I sought some advice. I have been trying for several days to flash an upgraded ROM onto my wife's i545 model. The phone was bought by mailorder and we live in Australia. I have previously rooted my own phone; the biggest reason being to remove the obnoxious - check your battery cover - popup.
I have been able to root the phone with Kingroot.
So I 've been trying to flash an upgrade from Odin, but I can't find an appropriate tar or tar.md5 file. Scores of zips are available, but tar.md5s are nowhere to be found. I tried making my own tar.md5 from a youtube video. Basically, this involved using 7-zip to change a zip (I used cm12.1 and 13.1 direct from their website) into a tar file, and then using Cygwin to change it into an md5. When I load these home-created tar.md5s into Odin and press Start, Odin crashes.
I've also attempted to flash a recovery from the device itself, with twrp, clockworkmod and others. The flashing is "successful", but when I try to reboot to recovery, the device stops and says the bootup has failed.
So what suggestions do the experts have? Are the tar.md5s I created valid? Or are their valid tar.md5s available on the web? Is there something about this phone which prevents the bootup into recovery? The original complaint was the wi-fi connection. I also tried flashing a new kernel SCH-I545_MD2_423399_Kernel.tar.md5 and SCH-I545_MD2_562219_Kernel.tar.md5, philz_touch_6.48.4-hlte.tar.md5, TWRP-2.5.0.0-devjfltevzw.tar.md5, and TWRP-2.6.3.1-devjfltevzw.tar, all of which fail.
I've also tried Flash-Fire which insists the phone isn't rooted, although root-checker says it is, and Flashify which has the same problem of appearing to work but then booting up to error.

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BillSchutt said:
I thought it was time I sought some advice. I have been trying for several days to flash an upgraded ROM onto my wife's i545 model. The phone was bought by mailorder and we live in Australia. I have previously rooted my own phone; the biggest reason being to remove the obnoxious - check your battery cover - popup.
I have been able to root the phone with Kingroot.
So I 've been trying to flash an upgrade from Odin, but I can't find an appropriate tar or tar.md5 file. Scores of zips are available, but tar.md5s are nowhere to be found. I tried making my own tar.md5 from a youtube video. Basically, this involved using 7-zip to change a zip (I used cm12.1 and 13.1 direct from their website) into a tar file, and then using Cygwin to change it into an md5. When I load these home-created tar.md5s into Odin and press Start, Odin crashes.
I've also attempted to flash a recovery from the device itself, with twrp, clockworkmod and others. The flashing is "successful", but when I try to reboot to recovery, the device stops and says the bootup has failed.
So what suggestions do the experts have? Are the tar.md5s I created valid? Or are their valid tar.md5s available on the web? Is there something about this phone which prevents the bootup into recovery? The original complaint was the wi-fi connection. I also tried flashing a new kernel SCH-I545_MD2_423399_Kernel.tar.md5 and SCH-I545_MD2_562219_Kernel.tar.md5, philz_touch_6.48.4-hlte.tar.md5, TWRP-2.5.0.0-devjfltevzw.tar.md5, and TWRP-2.6.3.1-devjfltevzw.tar, all of which fail.
I've also tried Flash-Fire which insists the phone isn't rooted, although root-checker says it is, and Flashify which has the same problem of appearing to work but then booting up to error.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The Verizon S4 had a locked bootloader. A custom recovery is not possible with the latest firmware. You can root using the methods in the General section. After you have root you can use Flashfire to flash zips. Stock firmware can be found at www.sammobile.com in case you screw up or get a bootloop. I recommend getting rid of KingRoot su for SuperSU. There is a YouTube video on doing it.
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