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Help Partial Root Gone Bad, Need to Unbrick

L

ltwhiteagle

Newbie
Hello Everyone! My friend recently tried to root his phone and foolishly unplugged it before the rooting finished. Now his phone doesn't boot-up all the way and just does the following:

When you start it up it says

Deleting Cryption Meta Data
-Copying media files....
Successfully copied meida (sic) files.

#manual mode#

updating application....
Successfully updated application

applying multi-CSC
Successfully applied multi-CSC

And a menu comes up, the title of the menu "Android system recovery <3e>"
with 4 options
reboot system now
apply update from sdcard
wipe data/factory reset
wipe cache partition

you can use the arrow keys to go up and down in the menu, but you
can't select any of the options.

no other response unless you press the search button, it shows the
picture of a triangle with a ! in it with the droid guy looking at it.

Any suggestions or if you can point me to a tread that solves this issue would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
 
I had bought a phone off of craigslist that had the same issue. I noticed that no personal computer would see the phone. I tried a mac, windows xp, windows vista, windows 7, linux fedora and ubuntu. The conclusion i came to was sprint had to replace it. I found no way around it. I waited a week for the replacement but a $30 galaxy s2 was well more than worth it. So if you have a sprint account, visit a corperate store and they will help you, but DO NOT LET THEM DIAGNOSE THE PHONE!!!! They tried to charge me $35 for doing less than I did. Odin and kies wont work because the PC wont see the phone in download mode.

Edit: I didnt pay $30 for it. It was $35 for the replacement. Traded the conquer 4g for the bricked galaxy. Paid $1.07 for that phone. So total money invested for the galaxy = $36.07. :-)
 
MartyMcFly85: Thank you for your suggestion. I'd love to do that, but the phone doesn't turn on all the way and any sprint guy would try to at least turn it on, the phone is stuck in a boot loop so they'll recognize right away it's been messed with by pressing the power button. Also, I can't activate it on my line that has the $8 insurance because I can't get pass the boot screen to program it using Sprint ## method. Any other ideas on how to fix the usb malfunction?
 
rbasusparky: Thank you for the suggestion, but the home button doesn't work. I've tried pressing it in once, and a million times and held it down too with no results. The only buttons that work are the power for on/off, volume rocker to switch between the menu options described in your post, and the search button that when pressed, shows only a screen with a white triangle, yellow exclamation point and small droid guy.
Any other way to hard reset? Someone said I may have usb malfunction on my phone, any fixes for that?
 
Everyone, after doing more research, I'm quite sure the USB on the phone is malfunctioning, thus it's a hardware issue. People have said this can happen when a ROM doesn't flash right. So, I just broke down and sent it to mobiletechvideos.com to get a jtag brick repair. From the sites FAQ's it seems like they specialize in this situation and actually take the phone apart to by-pass the USB port, flash it directly and get the USB working again while putting it back to stock ROM. Cost $59 after shipping but I guess that's better than buying a new phone. Thanks again for your help.
 
It not a hardware issue. Since the root process was interupted, it basically crippled the firmware. I am not 100% sure exactly what happens but when you root this phone, you have to push a modified version of the firmware to the phone. So it deletes the previous version on the phone. I dont know why it has to be so risky to root this phone. I would love to root and apply a custom kernal and rom, but its not worth possibly bricking this thing. Samsung has a special device to reapply firmware. Unfortunatly, nobody including sprint has it.
 
Since you were able to get into the Android Recovery area you simply needed to apply a stock rom. Even better, you can apply a stock rom with root and cwm.
The stock rom can be applied by changing the name of the zip to update.zip. Just make sure it is a signed version. The other option was to try odin and see if the usb was recognized there. (volume down + power button). Dont let this one bad instance deter you from rooting. Its fun on the dark side. We have cookies.
 
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