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Help Brick House!!!

S

skyllz

Newbie
Hello everyone, I come to you in a time of need lol. As of friday 3/4/2011, I am the owner of a new Samsung Epic 4G. This is infact my first android phone ever. I used to be an honorary member of the blackberry community and I decided to go with a better phone finally now that I was eligible for upgrade. Anyway, lets get down to the brass tax. In my adventures from friday night up until 3AM sunday, I have successfully figured out how to Root my phone, turn on wifi, open some hidden menus, extract my MSL code, register to be an android developer and download all kinds of software I have no idea what to do with, upgrade the phone to 2.2 FROYO, and completely back it up. Sounds like a lot to do with no experience and only being a little bit over 24 hours huh?? It kinda was, but I slept in shifts and managed to pull it off!! Then I got cocky (stop laughing) and decided to flex my newly developed android muscles and go for the big one. Yep, I tried loading 2.3 GINGERBREAD!!!! (KEYWORD: tried)
I dont know if I will be frowned upon for cursing, but yeah, I bricked the shit out of my phone. Now it wont do anything at all, I cant even get it to boot into download or recovery mode. Anyone ever come across a problem like this? I hope I'm not the only one to experience such success in the world of failure. Any help would be greatly appreciated!!!!
 
You mean gingerbread for the GSM EUROPEAN version of the Galaxy S??? That'll brick it! :(

If you can't get into download mode or recovery.... :( :(

Try pulling the battery and trying to get into DL mode. What happens when you plug in the charger?


Hopefully you can get Sprint to replace it! Did you have insurance??
 
I cant get it to do anything, and if I knew it was GSM software I wouldn't have tried it, that sure explains a lot...lmao, I guess after successfully loading FROYO on there I should have been content. But where's the fun in being content?!?!? LOL
I'm just gonna make up a bullshit story about the phone and claim innocent and have them replace the phone for free, it hasn't even been a full 48 hours since I bought it. So I'll just go get a new one and hack my way back to 2.2 FROYO again hahaha. I'll let it get used to 2.2 before I try to aim for 2.3 again. And for the Joke of the Day....


Let's not have another "Epic" Fail!!!!! lol
 
Well I appreciate the help and knowledge of what went wrong, but to my avail, I just got back home from sprint with a brand new Epic. FROYO here I come!!!!! (again) lol

Oh and they gave me the new phone with the extra 16GB memory card and the box with all the accessories too. LOL.....SCORE!!!
 
Lol, thanks, i needed a good laugh! :-) welcome to android! I also used to be of the blackberry ilk myself, never looking back! You will be more than happy you switched and probably kick yourself in the pants for not doing it sooner, i know i did.
 
HAHA! Question: What did you tell them?

I'm in basically the same boat, except I've had my phone since release.. Luckily my phone is insured, though!
Was trying to odin from to EB13 from DK28 and screen went yellow for 5 mins straight, so I pulled battery/disconnected and tried again. I've tried several times (download mode is the only thing I can get into), so I'm thinking an exchange is my only hope.


EDIT:
Messed with odin a bit more after reading more forums. Now it won't even turn on or respond to the usb charger being plugged in. My guess is they won't be able to access any files to point the finger at rooting.
 
@rounsy222 Thanks for the welcome, you're absolutely right, I'm in love with this phone and as soon as I got home with the new one I did everything to it that I did to the first one. Except the 2.3 update, for "particular" reasons lol, but as far as switching over sooner, the older OS's that I have seen my friends use like on the G1 when it first came out gave a ton of problems and I was like "Ha, yall jumped on that android bandwagon a bit too early in the game!! LOL" But blackberry had their issues back in the day as well. So I guess I can only fall back to the saying "Nothing happens before its time."

@rawragargle This is funny!! I walked in there Sunday morning pissed as hell (fake anger of course lol) and a sprint rep greeted me and asked how he could help. Several profanities were used in my response, not aimed at him of course but at the phone for being an extremely expensive big piece of garbage. (disclaimer: Epic #1, it was just a front, I don't really feel that way about you, sorry things couldn't work out between us.) (lol) Ok, so yeah, I simply told the sprint rep, "Look man, last night I was watching a movie and I noticed the battery was low on the phone, so I was going to plug it into the charging dock when the movie was over but I fell asleep during the movie and forgot to plug it in. This morning around 6:30 I woke up, and grabbed the phone to check it to see if I had any missed calls or texts and it was off so I thought the battery just died. So I put it on the dock for about an hour and then tried to turn it on and nothing so I put it back on the dock and then I noticed the "little red light" wasn't coming on. (Meanwhile the sprint rep has my phone and he's goin thru all kinds of stuff, swapping batteries, chargers, usb link-ups to his computer, recovery mode, download mode, and he's getting no luck lol) "I then took the power cord out of the dock and put it into the phone directly and still nothing. I thought the outlet might have gone bad so I switched outlets and same results. My next thought was the charger itself. So I plugged the phone up to my laptop and used the usb charging method and still nothing. Now it's 12 noon and I have been trying to get this damn phone to come one for over 5 1/2 hours. This is absolutely ridiculous, if I knew less than 48 hours after I bought this phone it was gonna be giving me problems I wouuld have never spent the money. Now I hope you still have my old blackberry back there because I sure as hell ain't spending another penny in replacing this phone." And the rep said "Oh no sir it has only been 2 days since you bought the phone, we're gonna swap it out for you at no charge and you can keep your same phone number. I have never seen something like this happen to the phone and I truly apologize for the inconvenience of you having to come out here on a sunday afternoon" Now before I left my house to head over to sprint, I completly formatted the SD card so they wouldn't see any of the files I put on there during my "adventures". So the rep programs the new phone and puts the memory card in the phone, then he has a weird look on his face. ???? He takes it back out and blows on it (for what reason is beyond me) and sticks it back in the phone. The he asks me if I had anything on the memory card, and I said "Don't play with me!! I have picture's from my cousins wedding yesterday, and I cannot retake those pictures!!" He apologized like 6 times and told me the old phone must have wiped out the card when it went out and he gave me my SD card back and the SD card for the new phone and the box for the new phone with everything in it. LOL!!
 
I realized how long that response was so I am making a new one for my response to your dilemma. I know I am wrong for saying this because it was simply misuse on my part, but because it is the control and not the variable in both of our cases, I'm going to say ODIN IS THE DEVIL!!! Stay away from ODIN!! Now with that being said, I am going to ask if you can still get your phone to boot into download mode which would be powering up the phone holding the "1 key" on the qwerty keyboard. If not then I guess its time to brush up on your theatrics and head over to your closest provider store and put on an oscar worthy performance lol. If you can boot into download mode, which I'm hoping you can, try seeing if you can boot the phone into recovery mode....

Hold down the VOLUME DOWN button, and the CAMERA button (Note: The Camera button has 2 pressure levels. During camera operation you can press it down to the first click for focusing on your target, and then you can press it down some more to actually take the picture. When trying to boot into recovery mode make sure you have it pressed down all the way. I have read a bunch of forums telling you how to boot into recovery mode and none of them explain that button to anyone.) Now third, press and hold the POWER button. Hold all 3 down until the recovery screen comes on. When it does, use the VOLUME buttons to move up and down thru the menu options and use the HOME button on the touch screen make your selection. Option number 2 is going to be "apply sdcard:update.zip". This is the option that will save your phone from "Brick City". Now I am hoping that you can boot into this mode on your phone and if you can, I have a fully working .zip file to bring your phone to 2.2.1 FROYO.DK28. You probably know all of this already but I'm just stating it in case you don't, or if another noob such as myself were to stumble across this post they can use it to get their phone back on it's feet. Now with this .zip file that I have, all you have to do is put it on the root of the SD card and put the SD card back into your phone and boot into recovery mode and select the option that I previously stated in my "tutorial" hehe. The file is already properly named so you dont have to make any changes to it. So if you want to go this route I can easily send you this file thru email or any type of messenger service. I have windows live messenger, yahoo, aim, and skype. Reply back and let me know what you wanna do.

p.s) I would post the link to where I got the .zip file but I have no idea what website I got it from. I downloaded a bunch of crap that I have no idea what to do with it. I even paid 25 yucks to the android developers site to register as a developer and downloaded ALL of their developing software. Yeah, I turned into a downloading freak that first night all the way up until I bricked my phone with a european version of 2.3 lol.
 
Skyllz:
As of last night around 8, I could ONLY get into download mode.. but recovery mode gave me the "phone->Yellow triangle with an exclamation point->computer" symbol. At first I could even see the SAMSUNG boot screen, but then it even turned into the crappy symbol. I looked around for a while and found a few people who had the same problem with Odin, and someone at XDA-devs had suggested clicking the repartition button.. so I tried it! It seemed to work at first, because the loading bar showed up under Andy. It got maybe an inch across the screen in 2 minutes. I left and came back an hour later and it was at the same spot, so I decided to just pull the plug + battery. WELL at that point I couldn't get ANY response. Before, like I said, I could get into download mode, and I could even get the battery icon to come up when it was hooked up and off.. but after running Odin the last time it was completely fried.

Went to Sprint this morning, though. Showed them my phone and they did basically they same thing they did for yours - new battery, recovery mode, put different chargers in it. The lady at the desk looked at me and said: "Did you try to root your phone??" she seemed to be joking, which makes me think it WASN'T a big deal. I was going to tell her, but instead stuck to my original story and said: "I don't know what happened.. I got a charger off of ebay and it killed it." They seemed to believe me, and apparently that IS a legit problem.. because they said they've even seen that happen with Radio Shack chargers.

In the end, I'm out 1 phone for today and most of tomorrow. My new/refurb (not sure which) epic will be coming around 2 PM tomorrow ;)

Hope our adventures help any and all who experience the same problems, haha.
 
I did the exact same thing as rawragargle. Ran into issues upgrading to froyo via clockwork's update.zip method because rooting my phone (even though I had unrooted it) removed the asphalt5 demo that sprint needs for the official upgrade (BS, FY Sprint!). So I went the ODIN route which I am somewhat familiar with, and ran into issues on formatting the file system. I must have found the same post at XDA-devs where the re-partition option was suggested. DON'T DO THIS UNLESS YOU ABSOLUTELY KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING - turns out this messes with the bootloaders which is probably the easiest way to brick you phone, and yep, sure enough, brick city, brick shit house, bricksville, whatever you want to call it.

But went into sprint (didn't have the theatrics of skyllz), told them "I went to sleep with my phone charging like I always do and woke up to it dead and won't boot." So they took it to the back and after 45 minutes determined it was "shorted out..." lol - I guess they have no better tools then us. Anyway, a new (refurb) was sent out to me the next day.

Long story short - DON'T RE-PARTITION WITH ODIN.

-rbrad
 
Like I said people, ODIN IS THE DEVIL!!! LMAO, but on the brighter side, the phone is running fine on FROYO, and i would like to give a shout out to Angry Birds for keeping entertained for over 4 hours lmao!!
 
The replacement Epic was DI18 (as I expected), so I updated to EB13 (Froyo) via the update.zip method, rooted it with nooblh's oneclick, and installed the gingerbread keyboard - bec the f'n android keyboard in EB13 (and DK28) doesn't autocorrect!!!!!

So all is well in epic/froyo land...
 
Thought I would pass along a cool trick I found when my root experience went haywire. The short story is everything was fine then it started a boot loop. Then Reflashing did nothing. Then none of my three computers would recognize my epic, It woudl go into download mode but couldn't be seen, recovery just went to PTC(phone, triangle, Computer).
So after a couple of days I came home, had a few too many beverages, and discovered a few things.
1. if At the PTC screen you can, plug in the charger, drop the battery out and give it the three finger death grip while watching the battery symbol flash five times. After 5 times reinstall battery, give it the death grip again and Bingo ClockworkMod Recovery. However this did me no good as none of the updates fixed my problem.

2. After trying my wifes epic I realized that none of the computers liked her phone either. After restoring windows to an earlier point they still didn't like either epic. This left me with the realization that it wasn't the phone or the computer, instead it had to be gremlins. I mean the only other option was completely impossible. Absolutely no way that 4 previously fine cords all died at the same time.
Well almost no way. Three cords were smaller aftermarket cords that now only work for charging, the last cord was the original cord but it was plugged into a usb extender. Once I plugged the original cord into the port on the back of the computer everything was right with the world. Odined back to stock and began giving myself the stupid chant while waiting for fedex to arive with my replacement phone. Oh well now I have a spare to test roms out on.
 
Got my new phone yesterday. It also obviously had DI18.. so I'm flashing froyo when I get time - probably this weekend. The sprint store trip was really cool, though. The lady at the desk asked me how I liked my epic, again. Then she talked about problems with people rooting their phones and made fun of them for not making a recovery.. then, what put my mind at ease about this store, we talked about the different epic roms, how people are suckers for paying a premium for wifi tether, etc XD

I'm now okay with possibly bricking my phone, because I know I'm PROBABLY not going to have trouble with that branch ;)
 
I like this forum, people treat all of the threads seriously not just pick and choose based on the title. I appreciate all the help and support and I will be showing the same respect to everyone on here whenever and however I can. See you guys again soon!!!
 
FYI, insurance covers a "stolen" phone. For $100 deductible you get a new phone then you have one for parts. ;)
 
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