Comments on: Bricked my Samsung Galaxy S3

Question: Bricked my Samsung Galaxy S3

AMWKE1984 — Sat, 30 Jun 2012 14:28:33 -0800

I think I may have "bricked" my new Samsung Galaxy S3. Please help!

I just bought a new Samsung Galaxy S3 from T-mobile. I thought I would go ahead and try to "root" it so I could delete some of the bloatware. I have never rooted a phone before. I used Odin with a CF root. While rooting, it failed, now when I start my phone, it just says that firmware upgrade encountered an issue and to select recovey mode in kies and try again. The phone will not connect to Kies.

Please help me save my new phone!!

By: Netzapper

Netzapper — Sat, 30 Jun 2012 14:33:47 -0800

You need to use Odin to unbrick it.

Reflash it with a copy of the original OEM firmware for your carrier. You can find that on the forums.

I "bricked" my Droid Charge at least 10 times. All were recoverable in this way.

By: AMWKE1984

AMWKE1984 — Sat, 30 Jun 2012 14:45:12 -0800

Thank you, but what forums are you talking about?

By: MeghanC

MeghanC — Sat, 30 Jun 2012 15:26:21 -0800

The forums are generally the forums on XDA developers. I am assuming--though not certain--that the subforum for your phone is here.

By: Netzapper

Netzapper — Sat, 30 Jun 2012 19:12:54 -0800

Sorry, I had assumed that you were following forum guides. droidforums and xda developers are my goto places.

In general, you should find the threads for the firmware you want to run and then read the whole damn thing. You may find that your "stops halfway through" problem was already known and had a workaround, but that it's only documented on reply #223.

It really sucks, but the nature of the development (unsanctioned, questionable legality) and the short lifecycles of most mobile phones mean that development and documentation don't get centralized and indexed properly.

If you find a guide outside the firmware thread, check dates against the forum thread in order to make sure that the 3rd party guide actually reflects current reality. This is not proper quality assured software. This is, by definition, dodgy. So firmware can go from "works great, slight audio popping" to "cripples phone and doesn't allow boot" in a couple nights' patches.