Database Info

[Q] Phone randomly boots at times, other times hangs at galaxy S3 logo

So I had a problem where I had issues getting a ROM onto my phone after entirely formatting it.
Some kind members helped me to get the phone running again and then getting TWRP 2.6.3.1 on it with the 4.1.2 build.
This was flashed to the phone using Odin after using E-Z Unlock 1.2 to unlock the bootloader and install TWRP 2.6.0.0.
I saw some random issues when I would reboot or power off and on with it locking on the Samsung Galaxy S III logo... but the phone rebooted eventually and I was able to continue use.
Fast forward to today -- for the first time in awhile, my battery fully discharged. When I got home, I plugged in and tried to power on my phone. Locked at the Samsung Galaxy S III logo... EVERY. TIME.
So I go into recovery... I find that the first thing that greets me is a message asking me for a password. This is odd, since I never put a password on anything... I try to mount the system/cache/external partitions. I try to factory reset to try a different rom. I'm told it works but there's a failure message because of E: cannot decrypt data. I try to flash a different rom anyway. It says it was successful. I flash the gapps, more success messages. I try to reboot and again I'm locked at the Samsung Galaxy S III logo.
Random side note -- sometimes my Samsung Galaxy S III logo has a blue android cat of some sort on it... not sure where that came from (one of the CMR flashes when I was trying to fix the phone, methinks).
It's so strange -- because I was obviously able to load a custom ROM with the current bootloader and recovery -- and now after my phone's battery drained, I'm back to being dead in the water... I really need to get to the bottom of having my phone boot into a ROM reliably.
Previous ROM was Gummy Nightly 01-06-14.
New flashed ROM is CyanFox 2.0.2.
Please help. I need my phone up and working as soon as possible here, I'm expecting important calls in the morning, so this is horrible timing.

corrosivefrost said:
So I had a problem where I had issues getting a ROM onto my phone after entirely formatting it.
Some kind members helped me to get the phone running again and then getting TWRP 2.6.3.1 on it with the 4.1.2 build.
This was flashed to the phone using Odin after using E-Z Unlock 1.2 to unlock the bootloader and install TWRP 2.6.0.0.
I saw some random issues when I would reboot or power off and on with it locking on the Samsung Galaxy S III logo... but the phone rebooted eventually and I was able to continue use.
Fast forward to today -- for the first time in awhile, my battery fully discharged. When I got home, I plugged in and tried to power on my phone. Locked at the Samsung Galaxy S III logo... EVERY. TIME.
So I go into recovery... I find that the first thing that greets me is a message asking me for a password. This is odd, since I never put a password on anything... I try to mount the system/cache/external partitions. I try to factory reset to try a different rom. I'm told it works but there's a failure message because of E: cannot decrypt data. I try to flash a different rom anyway. It says it was successful. I flash the gapps, more success messages. I try to reboot and again I'm locked at the Samsung Galaxy S III logo.
Random side note -- sometimes my Samsung Galaxy S III logo has a blue android cat of some sort on it... not sure where that came from (one of the CMR flashes when I was trying to fix the phone, methinks).
It's so strange -- because I was obviously able to load a custom ROM with the current bootloader and recovery -- and now after my phone's battery drained, I'm back to being dead in the water... I really need to get to the bottom of having my phone boot into a ROM reliably.
Previous ROM was Gummy Nightly 01-06-14.
New flashed ROM is CyanFox 2.0.2.
Please help. I need my phone up and working as soon as possible here, I'm expecting important calls in the morning, so this is horrible timing.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
At this point I would take the phone back to factory stock, are you able to boot into Odin mode?

buhohitr said:
At this point I would take the phone back to factory stock, are you able to boot into Odin mode?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah -- I can boot everywhere, pretty much.
I ended up formatting everything... I tried CyanFox again, but after install, it was throwing errors all over the place (not sure why).
I then formatted everything again and loaded up Gummy... it seems to be working relatively well.
I'm not sure what caused TWRP to think it was encrypted, but I'm guessing that had something to do with the issue?
Is there anything I can do to try to prevent this type of issue from happening in the future?

corrosivefrost said:
Yeah -- I can boot everywhere, pretty much.
I ended up formatting everything... I tried CyanFox again, but after install, it was throwing errors all over the place (not sure why).
I then formatted everything again and loaded up Gummy... it seems to be working relatively well.
I'm not sure what caused TWRP to think it was encrypted, but I'm guessing that had something to do with the issue?
Is there anything I can do to try to prevent this type of issue from happening in the future?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I know for a fact that there has been issues with the flashing of 4.4 and encryption. The best bet is to turn encryption on then off again. Now you said you never encrypted it but the Turn it on then off again approch might work here. I also know for a while TWRP had issues flashing 4.4 so it might be worth it to run CWM.

[Completed] Is my Galaxy S3 (i747M) memory damaged, is it bricked?

I previously posted in the local Galaxy S3 i747M section with the same problem, but now the issue is worse than before.
Here's my previous thread:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/galaxy-s3-att/help/boot-loop-plugged-to-ac-twrp-wipe-data-t3070064
A note that I'm no stranger to flashing and the inner workings of Android architecture (ROMs and general hardware), . But for the sake of this issue, please feel free to treat me like a noob if you think it would help elaborate any procedures I should follow or troubleshooting steps I should take, or just throw ideas at me like the software dev that I am and expect me to figure it out on my own.
Some background:
Recently (around beginning of April), my phone began to exhibit strange behaviour - reboots when reading/writing from internal memory (not uSD card), unable to wipe /data partition in TWRP or CWM. I would also get bootloops when I was plugged into direct AC charging (no problems if plugged into a computer for charging, though).
When in TWRP, CWM, and Philz, I would not be able to wipe the /data partition or anything in it. Installing anything to /system also caused a crash (though wiping it didn't cause any issues). Doing a factory reset wipe would also cause the recovery to "crash" - the recovery would freeze up and the phone would reboot. I could not restore a NANdroid, I could not install a new custom ROM. In TWRP, if I opened up a terminal window and manually tried to repair the /data and /system partitions with the e2fsck command, it would still freeze up and crash.
At that point, I downloaded the stock 4.4 firmware image (I think it was NF2?) from Sam Mobile and flashed it via Download Mode + Odin. Booted it up and ran the phone stock for probably a week. Then, I carefully used Odin to flash a freshly downloaded (and MD5 verified) TWRP 2.8.6.0 TAR image and SuperSU. Flashed both via Odin just fine. From there, I mounted the microSD card - I didn't want to touch the internal memory for now - and copied over a fresh downloaded copy of a CM12 based ROM (also MD5 verf'd) to it. From there, still in TWRP, I successfully flashed a 4.4.x TouchWiz-based ROM.
Take note that at this point, doing anything to attempt to wipe /data still leads to crashing the recovery. Nothing I have done has resolved this issue. I left that issue alone, just happy to have a working phone.
That above procedure seemed to work. I could then use the phone for about 2 weeks. Then my phone started crashing again, same as before: only when I was doing something that was reading/writing the internal memory. E.g. music, podcasts, etc.
I followed the same procedure with Odin + stock firmware > reboot > Odin + TWRP + SuperSU > flash custom ROM. Worked fine again for 2 more weeks.
Here I am 1 month later, same problem as the last 2 times. This time, however, after flashing the custom ROM, it does not boot up now. My phone is at home because I cannot use it. Last night, upon trying to boot up S3rx and PAC 5.1, I literally let it sit at the boot animation for 1 hour, each, and neither got past the boot animation. I'm familiar with ROMs sometimes taking say 10 minutes upon very first boot on a clean flash, but I gave up after about 1 hour (in fact, 1.5 hours for PAC 5.1, which was my second attempt last night). It's to the point where I'm certain if I left my phone plugged into the AC, it would still be at the boot animation over 12 hours later.
I know of the NAND memory corruption issue that S3's had previously, and I did flash the stock firmware that came out at the time (I think it was an Lxx based bootloader+firmware). But that was years ago, end of 2012 if memory serves me correct.
Thoughts on what I am facing? What I should try and do next? Where to go from here? If this is a hardware issue that is beyond fixing with flashing things in fastboot/ADB/Odin, then I'll face defeat and look for a new phone. But if I can hang on to this phone for just a little bit longer...
Thanks!

Hi there
Please note the following sticky from the top of the Assist section,
> General discussion > XDA Assist > The Purpose of XDA Assist [Please Read]
As a senior member on XDA, I am quite confident that you know where your device section is (you already asked something there) and where to ask for help.
Thanks for understanding
Good luck

Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 P5110 bootloop

Hi! So, my father's old Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 P5110 (bought 5 years ago) has gotten into a bootloop. It's an odd case. Basically, it's like the device is completely read-only.
To describe the symptoms:
It boots into the OS, but after 30 seconds or so it suddenly restarts. The device cannot be turned off (it just reboots and reboots and reboots...), so it empties the battery if left unplugged.
I can enter download mode and recovery mode, where the device is stable.
The device is not rooted.
I tried to flash it with TWRP recovery (it worked on my mother's tablet; exact same model, but no problem like this), but the recovery mode is always unchanged. I've flashed with Odin 1.8*, Odin 3.0*, and latest Heimdall; it always completes, but nothing changes. I've learned about having to boot to recovery after flashing due to a script replacing custom recovery, but even when I go directly to recovery mode, it's the same old stock recovery.
I decided to try another approach, by uninstalling apps during those short 30 second intervals of functioning OS; I got to uninstall one app (AVG anti-virus software), but after the reboot, the app was installed again.
I tried to go into recovery mode to do "wipe data/factory reset" and "wipe cache partition", but even that did nothing! Everything is where it was.
I can use ADB in recovery mode, so I tried to see if I could do some damage there, but the tablet is unrooted, and no rooting works either. (Tried rooting with Odin and "apply update from external storage" in stock recovery.) Couldn't find a writable directory to upload a su executable into either.
Just now I finished a 90 minute flashing of some Chilean stock firmware -- although I'm Swedish -- to see if that made things "rewritable", but guess what? All the old apps and files and settings were still there, in Swedish.
At this point I'm starting to suspect that I could hit it with a sledgehammer and it would just return to normal after a minute.
My father is not poor (just a bit cheap!), so buying a new tablet isn't a big deal, but I'm ostensibly a computer engineer...ing student, so it feels like a surrender to leave it unsolved. What might be the problem? Can memory in these devices become read-only due to some hardware fault?
Risky suggestions are welcome. If it's bricked, that's no problem.
EDIT: Whoops! My father ordered a new tablet; I was still going to experiment on the old one, maybe get it working again, but it seems that he went and tried the sledgehammer mode on it. But what happened is still an open question.

samsung galaxy tab 2 infinite reboot loop

Hi, i have samsung galaxy tab 2 (P5100) with no root. It started to restart 5-10 seconds after android starts... (i dont have time to go the settings or to do something before restart).
I tried to clear cache and factory reset from recovery but it doesnt work. (in recovery it shows done but when i reboot system, no changes are made)...
I also tried to flash new stock room with odin but it failed every time ( i use different versions of odin, different rooms and different pits). it fails after NAND write or system.img.
Im also not able to flash new recovery... in odin it pass but when i start recovery mode there is no change...
Does someone have similar problem? Im afraid that it could be problem with motherboard or memory.
In recoveory i see this error:
# MANUAL MODE #
--Appling Multi-CSC...
Aplied the CSC-code : ORS
failed to compare '/system/csc/common/system/app/MH_10_TCS_Tablet.apk' '/system/app/MH_10_TCS_Tablet.apk' (no data available)
Thank for any help.

Your tablet may have the emmc bug, sorry but only a mother board replacement or emmc firmware update will fix it

Same problem, not yet solved.
I also have a samsung tab 2. We bought it around 2013 and started to have problems around 2015. My device started to reboot out of nowhere, infinitely, randomly. I tried to look for patterns. Couldn't find any. But i noticed something, it's stuck on it's current state. When i do things like install an app or take/delete pictures, when it restarts, everything i did would be gone and it's back to it's "current state". App that i installed? Not there. Pictures i've taken? Gone. Pictures i've deleted? It's there again. Even a hard reset won't do anything. When i do a hard reset and it reboots again, guess what, back into it's "current state" again. I've read about it on some forums, i think it's hardware related. Emmc. A notoriously bugged chip, where when you clear your cache or flash it with a new os or something like that. Boom! Brickbug. I tried sending it to the samsung dealership where i bought it. They checked it. They said the motherboard needed to be replaced, which was very expensive. I'd rather buy a new one. Now it's 2018, i'm hoping they've found an alternative to fix this tablet.

Galaxy S6 - freezing and rebooting 50+ times a day

I've got a Vodafone UK version SM-G920F that has recently started to freeze, crash and reboot constantly.
I managed to back up my data and perform a factory reset from the Setting page, but it crashed 10+ times during the install process (would freeze at various different stages, either rebooting on its own, or requiring a Vol Down+Power reset)
I'm now on a fresh install, but it's still rebooting constantly. I managed to use it like normal for an hour today, but right now it's just rebooted 3 times and won't even get past the Samsung loading screen without several Vol Down+Power resets.
What other options do I have? And is anyone aware of a known hardware issue that could cause this?
I was considering flashing a different ROM, but I'm scared it would reboot during the process and corrupt something...

robjg said:
I've got a Vodafone UK version SM-G920F that has recently started to freeze, crash and reboot constantly.
I managed to back up my data and perform a factory reset from the Setting page, but it crashed 10+ times during the install process (would freeze at various different stages, either rebooting on its own, or requiring a Vol Down+Power reset)
I'm now on a fresh install, but it's still rebooting constantly. I managed to use it like normal for an hour today, but right now it's just rebooted 3 times and won't even get past the Samsung loading screen without several Vol Down+Power resets.
What other options do I have? And is anyone aware of a known hardware issue that could cause this?
I was considering flashing a different ROM, but I'm scared it would reboot during the process and corrupt something...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Maybe a battery issue?

a friend just gave me his very same model phone with the very same issues.. if I find out anything I'll tell you here, or if you solve it first please write down what you did.

Thanks Vibbuz.
I've been trying to download a stock firmware to flash via Odin, but download speeds from Updato are really bad.

So I managed to flash a firmware after installing Odin on a Windows laptop (painful trying to get it to work on my Mac)
Firmware installed OK, but after boot I was getting a constant "com.sec.epdg" pop-up box that wouldn't let me use the phone at all. Not sure if that's due to the tsar3000 firmware?
Wiped the cache and did a factory reset after booting into recovery, and now it's stuck in a boot-loop again (95% of the time it hangs at the Samsung logo animation)

Just tried using SamFirm v0.3.6 to find the correct file. Downloaded a 4gb file, but several attempts to extract only gives BL, CP, CSC files but no AP (throws up an Unknown Error during process).
So still stumped!

Yet another update. Left Updato running overnight and downloaded a firmware.
Flashed it with Odin, claims to have succeeded but phone then reboots and hangs at "Erasing" stage (Android logo is spinning, then stops)
I'm starting to think it's pretty broken...

I've been having this exact same issue since June. If your phone happens to boot try activating power saving mode (to reduce cpu speed) as soon as possible.
It seems that doing that diminished the frequency in which my phone rebooted. If it also helps you it might be a faulty battery that can't provide enough voltage. (I'm not 100% sure on this part though, just thought of it because of the apple batteries drama)
Please post your results! Looks like a lot of people are affected by this and it would be great if we could find the cause of the problem.

I just read your thread actually! Sounds very similar to mine.
I've got nowhere. I don't think it's hard-bricked as I can still access Odin mode on the phone, and sometimes boots to Recovery, but it freezes and various different points and is currently unusable (either freezes at Samsung logo, "Erasing" part after installing firmware, or once it started to run though new device setup then froze).
Went ahead and bought an S8, but still want to fix the S6!

robjg said:
I've got a Vodafone UK version SM-G920F that has recently started to freeze, crash and reboot constantly.
I managed to back up my data and perform a factory reset from the Setting page, but it crashed 10+ times during the install process (would freeze at various different stages, either rebooting on its own, or requiring a Vol Down+Power reset)
I'm now on a fresh install, but it's still rebooting constantly. I managed to use it like normal for an hour today, but right now it's just rebooted 3 times and won't even get past the Samsung loading screen without several Vol Down+Power resets.
What other options do I have? And is anyone aware of a known hardware issue that could cause this?
I was considering flashing a different ROM, but I'm scared it would reboot during the process and corrupt something...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Does it have twrp? Try a non stock ROM and kernel

So did anyone manage to find an issue in this rebooting. I am having the same issue.

damir_nis said:
So did anyone manage to find an issue in this rebooting. I am having the same issue.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hi I have same Problem I send the my s6 for repairmen that Saied me this problem related to mobile Hard drive.
I didn't believe it and try some official rom and a rom from Philippine GLB solve my problem for 3 M/o but now developed as same problem whitout any successful rom installation.
I think this problem from incompatibility google play store version to my rom. please flash a custom rom without google apps and immediately after installation turned off data and Wi-Fi internet after 2 day whit sim card whit out any change in setting can use it.

Hello,
anyone found some kind of solution? Happened to me also - freezing, restarts and then my S6 stopped working.. Sometimes I can boot to recovery menu, sometimes it boots up to android (and then freezes again), but the chances are almost non existing. Service man told me the same thing as @ghasemzm - eMMC failure. Yes, it is completely possible, but i don't wanna believe it, because they only tried to reflash the rom. I've made some "google research" and found that there were some issues in power IC on S6/S6E. Could this be related to it?

ghasemzm said:
Hi I have same Problem I send the my s6 for repairmen that Saied me this problem related to mobile Hard drive.
I didn't believe it and try some official rom and a rom from Philippine GLB solve my problem for 3 M/o but now developed as same problem whitout any successful rom installation.
I think this problem from incompatibility google play store version to my rom. please flash a custom rom without google apps and immediately after installation turned off data and Wi-Fi internet after 2 day whit sim card whit out any change in setting can use it.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Will test the theory and let the group know.

So i have installed philipines latest update 6.0.1 i think with PIT file provided on Sammobile.
I have tested it for a day with normal ussage like i set up every other phone and it still continued restarting.
Figured out let me test with no google account signed in and the phone is working perfectly. For a full day.
So i dont know what the problem is but i will try again with google account tomorrow for a day see what happens.
After that will install 7.0.1 uk update with PIT file for it and test with that.

I have the same problem and I am quite sure that it is the mobile hard drive.
I tried to use F2FS but didn't find a working rom for that.
Samsung refused repair because of root.... Never Samsung again!

same issues here - any solutions found? My best guess is hardware fault...