I have a few specific questions at the bottom, but first, here's the long details:
I ran the custom ROM
Hyperdrive RLS 16 (4.1.2) for years and loved it, but the past week I felt it was time to upgrade to a new ROM that was more up to date. I started to try out
R3ARMED (4.4.2), did a full wipe in CWM and installed the zip files provided (the ROM and a d2att specific file).
Unfortunately, in my excitement I forgot to make sure that I had a 4.4 bootloader and modem, which seems to be rather essential for this particular ROM. The install failed and I thought I may have bricked the device, but I was able to update CWM and get back into recovery mode. This time, I got through the AROMA installer for the new ROM, but on reset I got stuck in a hard bootloop. It's pretty nasty--I can't use the key combination to reboot into recovery or download mode, and I only get as far as the opening "SAMSUNG" screen before the device blacks out. However, I can use a USB jig to force reboot into download mode--it's the only interface I can get with the phone at this point. ODIN recognizes the device, and when I use Heimdall and its drivers, I'm able to use those tools to interact with the phone. So I hope I'm not completely lost, but not being able to access CWM recovery mode definitely hurts.
Here's what I've tried so far to fix it:
- Without a USB jig, load recovery images onto a 16 GB SD card, insert into phone and power up (no successes, some images actually made it so the "SAMSUNG" screen no longer showed, others corrected this issue)
- Re-flash CWM with heimdall (failed)
- Used the Ultimate Android Toolkit to convert the CWM img into a tar that ODIN can flash, and tried to load it (failed)
I'm looking into trying to flash a full recovery onto the phone to see if that can fix it. But I have a few concerns:
1. I know that once my phone gets a 4.4 bootloader and modem, I can't go back to an earlier stock version.
2. I had an unsuccessful 4.1 -> 4.4 install attempt in the process of
bricking updating my phone.
3. I have no idea if the install impacted the bootloader--so I don't know whether I can try a 4.3 stock flash or need to use some of the more recent phone dumps.
My first question is, as usual, what is the best route to take to recover this phone?
My second is, are there tools I can use for a phone in ODIN mode to check the version of the bootloader/modem, check on the integrity of the file system, etc. etc.?
I have a replacement phone on its way, but I view this as an excellent learning opportunity, and would love to hear some advice.