yashsingh1/xdaforums huggingface dataset:
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] garwynn:
Have you considered going to another store or speaking with another employee? As it would seem from reading it will depend more on who you speak to rather than the official company policy of accepting non-rooted devices. I wish I had more to offer on this but my E4GT is through a MVNO of Sprint, so I'm pretty much on my own.

Your other choice might be to contact Samsung directly and get it fixed under the 1 year warranty.

Good luck!
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] wildside84:
i will try another store. he said samsung wont even fix it bc its rooted. the guy was an overall jerk
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] brennam7:
Side question, does anyone know if you need to be the account holder to have sprint swap the phone under the 1yr warranty? It'd be a hell of alot easier for me to go by myself and get this taken care of. Thanks in advance!
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] wildside84:
yeah im under a family account as well and am not the primary account holder
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] garwynn:
It's been a LONG time since I've used Sprint (back in the "PCS" days)... but most carriers that I've used will let you do it if the device is in your name - even if that means you are not the account holder. This included Sprint when I used them.

You may also find that if your local store guy/gal knows you they'll probably do it as well. For example, my wife has the account under her name because of the MVNO we use. But any issues that come up or questions are usually addressed by me. They asked the first time and after that it hasn't been an issue.

So in short, why not try? The worst they will say is no... and you can find that out over the phone before you head over to a store.

*Edit* I didn't think about the case of minors - this may be a flat out "no". Again, doesn't hurt to make a call and check.
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] wildside84:
question: i now have the phone going to the "error encountered during firmware upgrade, please enter recovery mode in samsung kies and try again" will they be able to tell the phone is rooted by looking at that screen? will i have better luck?
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] brennam7:
when you used your jig, did it reset the counter to no? and say that the rom was samsung official?
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] wildside84:
yes. the other sprint store couldnt help told me to send it to samsung. called samsung, they told me to send the phone in and it would take at least 6 days to get it back or get it replaced. but im sure in this process they will discover the phone was rooted and i won't get jack. just my luck :(
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] stonesaber:
I was able to still flash a stock .tar in odin even after mine was stuck at the data.img. Can you get into download mode, and if you can, try flashing a non rooted stock .tar. I used sfhub's odin one click to flash a rooted version and then flashed rogue recovery. Then I was able to at least mount it through usb and get to the internal sdcard. At that point, I formatted it to remove all personal data that may be stored on the internal card. Then I went back and flashed a non rooted stock .tar and when it booted into recovery, it was the stock recovery.

I did this after I went to the Sprint store and my new one was on the way. The guy at my store didn't care if it was rooted previously, as long as Samsung didn't find out and do a charge back to him.

Just to make myself a little clearer. Mine would not boot past the boot animation and most of the time, wouldn't even get that far. I could get into dl mode and recovery but that's as far as it would go. I sent mine for the jtag repair and it was one of a couple that he tried and couldn't fix.
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] rde34:
Hope this helps...

First, I would probably consider going to another Sprint Store. Secondly, while your route seems different, your issue sounds identical to mine (using one click method I repeatedly got stuck at data.img). I opted to pay the $35 dollars and have Sprint replace my phone. What I wanted to point out is that I was paranoid about Sprint detecting that my phone was rooted. So, I odined the stock EG30 .tar even though I knew it wouldn't boot all the way through. Through everything I could consistently get into download mode. As I expected (since I'd tried it 20 times before whenI thought my phone was fixable) it didn't boot but it did get as far as the stock Samsung Galaxy boot screen. I pulled the battery and used my jig to reset the binary counter. I checked recovery and it gave me some sort of error screen. Next day I took it to Sprint, told them it wouldn't boot and the technician took it into the back to give it the once over. This is where I got a little worried. He came back and said that the, "root something, blah, blah..." was fried and that they would have to replace it. So, I'm not sure if you already tried these steps but it worked for me. If you can Odin back to the stock EG30 (I did not use the one click method), I think it at least makes it appear that whatever occurred happened to a stock device. Good luck.
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] brennam7:
so if you pay the $35 sprint gives you a new/refurb phone the same day?
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] rde34:
I'm on my old EVO 4G. They said a day or two. I thought about the Samsung option also but I figured what the Sprint tech wasn't able to detect, Samsung might be able to with a more extensive look at my device.
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] sfhub:
To be clear, the oneclick's had nothing to do with your /data partition being unwritable. That happened in a prior operation, likely involving an ics kernel, cwm, and data wipe or rom flash.

The oneclick was just the messenger that /data was hoarked. Cwm, traditional odin, and jtag would have relayed the same message.

If you flash the NoData version of the eg30 or ek02 odin oneclick, you would be able to have the flash conplete and you would be stock unrooted, but unable to boot (because /data was hoarked). After that use your jig and reset the odin flash counter if needed (the odin oneclick package I put out wouldn't have increased the flash count, but it could be non-zero from previos operation)
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] Dchibro:
One thing to think about is the volume of phones coming into Sprint due to "hardware failures" has probably increased dramatically over the past several weeks. Sprint may be looking at this, and probably also knows that ICS builds have been leaking out. They may be putting two and two together and sent out memos to repair centers about it and how to approach it, which in a simple form may mean taking a harder stance on warranty claims.

Also, there was a post recently in the "How I bricked ..." thread in General that said something about a tech saying a "microcode" on the phone was wiped or overwritten. I've never heard of this, but Samsung could be coaching them on additional ways to detect rooted/flashed devices. I'm just speculating here though.
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] wildside84:
ive already sent mine to samsung through ups today. im crossing my fingers and hoping they don't discover it was rooted, but i also just bought a used ns4g just in case...sigh, i miss my et4g
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] hussmanne:
Add me to the list...again. Did it the safe way after bricking last time (hadn't read all the issues). Flashed to EL26 first, reboot, clear data, flash CM9, flash GAPPS, reboot. Corrupt data thingy. New phone, flashed CM9 just fine, same process. Doesn't make any sense! :confused:
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] wildside84:
im staying away from ICS on this phone until theres an unofficial stable release
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] Dchibro:
Its not really about stability. Its about figuring out what the holy **** Samsung did with our ICS kernel that is hard bricking phones when formatting data with CWM. Unfortunately we won't even have chance to get the answer until the update officially goes out and Samsung publishes the kernel source code.
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] iniz94:
That's what mine said when I bricked it like 2-3 weeks ago but they accepted it without even checking Odin. The repair tech seemed a little oblivious but I also deserve an Oscar for my acting job :). I couldn't get into Recovery but I could get into Odin (and like I said, they didn't even check it). The guy only tried to clear my data but when he realized that he couldn't get into Recovery he googled a couple of things and then just said he'd order a new one. And like others said before, I chose the $35 option because I feared Samsung would possibly know about this error already. Phone came within 48 hours and it was brand new (I thought it might have been refurbished)
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] rde34:
Wasn't blaming oneclick at all. I was only trying to list things that I did along the way to having my device replaced so that the steps might be easier to be duplicated. I only meant to say that after I screwed my phone up oneclick would not complete its operation and that maybe it would be useful to flash the EG30 .tar via normal ODIN process since I was able to do it successfully. It at least made my device appear stock when I brought it in for replacement.
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] darkfire2024:
After reading through much of the thread, I realized that I did pretty much everything you're not supposed to do, except my phone still lives. I restored a nandroid using touch cwm on gb, I flashed and restored and wiped using rogue cwm ics kernel, and it was not until recently I odined stock el26 cwm to flash Blend ICS.

After odining, I now have a yellow triangle on boot and it says i900 something. Is my best bet now to use sfhubs one click el29 ?
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] wildside84:
you're lucky, the first time i went a root screen showing the 3d android guy came up and the repair tech said he cant do anything, so i attempted to flash fc07 through odin and unplugged it at data.img so then that samsung kies error screen showed. so i went to another sprint store and with my luck, they didnt have a repair tech. so i ended up just shipping it to samsung. im pretty sure im down and out a phone. already ordered a used ns4g for temporary
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] Mattheyu:
That will get rid of the triangle, but not the custom OS counter. You need a USB jib (if you're in Texas, let me know, I have a spare) or if you switch to an ICS ROM, try TriangleAway: http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1494114
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] drnull:
A quick update to: http://xdaforums.com/showpost.php?p=23529729&postcount=292

I have a replacement on the way from Sprint, they replaced it no cost, didn't ask that many questions. They tried a bunch of stuff and said it was messed up, they couldn't even flash the original rom to it (yeah, no kidding).

So I have this one for another day or so and can adb shell into it and run any commands. I'm planning on dd backuping all the partitions so I can compare things with the new phone to see if that gets me anywhere, but if anybody has anything they'd like me to try, speak up soon.
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] Mattheyu:
I Google'd for a bit, but I couldn't find out for sure if adb would recognize the device in download mode.

Also, try dd-rescue instead of just dd, in case the disk/partition is actually damaged. http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] drnull:
It doesn't recognize the device in download mode (from what I could see) but I did manage to flash a Rogue kernel on that took and would let me access adb in recovery mode.

Oddly enough, though, about half of my recovery flashes weren't taking. Really not sure what's up with that.
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] Mattheyu:
I was able to push Rogue's recovery as well, so when I get my device back, I may try to salvage my internal storage and then wipe it. (Evidence of root/flashing utilities on there.)

I was able to flash the individual components of EL29 through ODIN, but the one-click failed, which makes me think my device is in the same situation as yours.

I didn't have ADK installed, so I never tried mounting it, etc. I am really thinking about getting into Android development, because it is extremely hard to find advice from a *nix user's point of view. When I read that it was a formatting issue, I was curious as to why I couldn't use gparted to try and reformat, or extract the partition table from a stock ROM and overwrite the device's partition table with it.
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] garwynn:
When I first read about this I was as well - and that also comes from the fact that I disagree with most people when someone says hardware is the problem. I've only seen a handful of real hardware problems and either due to fault manufacturing, physical component failure or loss of embedded hardware instructions like BIOS to interface with the hardware. The mobiletechvideos gentleman posted his opinion on pages 29 and 30 - I still respectfully disagree with him but have little in the way of facts to currently back up my opinion.

Which reminds me, I have a follow up question from a few pages ago: Do I understand correctly that all partitions are on the same eMMC? If so, it would stand to believe that if it is stuck on one partition and others are good that there *should* be a way to get past this brick.

Does the community know who makes the eMMC for the E4GT? Are the JTAG attempts using a driver specifically for this eMMC or another device? If another device driver is being used I could also see the potential of this not behaving right. Or maybe there are multiple drivers being loaded and causing a conflict when trying to read/write to the eMMC?

Lastly, has anyone done a full read/write test on the eMMC? (Kind of like a bad sector/block check)

Sorry for not posting this before, it's a lot to take in when you're not familiar with Linux...
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] Mattheyu:
I would be wary if performing any read/write tests if the hardware is damaged. Either way, when I get my phone back, I'll see if I can make images of my partitions, then see what I can figure out. More comfortable with bash over a one-click application any day. ;)
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] drnull:
Yes, all partitions are on the same eMMC, if the parted table is to be believed:

parted /dev/block/mmcblk0
GNU Parted 1.8.8.1.179-aef3
Using /dev/block/mmcblk0
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
1 4194kB 25.2MB 21.0MB ext4 EFS
2 25.2MB 26.5MB 1311kB SBL1
3 27.3MB 28.6MB 1311kB SBL2
4 29.4MB 37.7MB 8389kB PARAM
5 37.7MB 46.1MB 8389kB KERNEL
6 46.1MB 54.5MB 8389kB RECOVERY
7 54.5MB 369MB 315MB ext4 CACHE
8 369MB 386MB 16.8MB MODEM
9 386MB 923MB 537MB ext4 FACTORYFS
10 923MB 3070MB 2147MB ext4 DATAFS
11 3070MB 15.4GB 12.4GB fat32 UMS
12 15.4GB 15.8GB 327MB ext4 HIDDEN

I have dd backup'ed 1-9 & 12. When trying to dd backup 10 and 11, the phone locks up (i.e., adb locks up, can't move around on recovery menu, etc) and I can't do anything else.

I have now removed partition 10 and recreated it (as ext2 and really small) and updated all the fstab. I then ran the onetouch nodata and the phone booted. :D

I'm not sure what to make of this yet... Need to play around with it some more.

EDIT: I was able to install the update-cm-9.0.0-RC0-epic4gtouch-031112.zip file and ICS started right up this time.

My data directory was still really small, though, so I flashed over the .PIT file to see if it would recreate everything. All it did was resize the data dir, it went from this:

10 923MB 1024MB 101MB ext2 DATAFS

to this:

10 923MB 3070MB 2147MB ext2 DATAFS

The phone still locks up when trying to dd out partition 10 though, so I worry what might happen once I fill up the data partition to whatever the point is where it's getting errors.

parted is still complaining though - this time because the FS in partition 10 isn't as large as the partition itself. Trying to delete and recreate the partition (as the full size 923MB-3070MB) doesn't seem to finish, it just sits at "writing per-group metadata... 6% (time left 00:45)" and then eventually locks up (volume keys don't move around menus)
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] Mattheyu:
That looks like bad news for me, since internal storage would be partition 11. No bueno. :(
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] drnull:
Interesting, since parted can't make ext4 partitions on this device, I thought I'd try something just for kicks. I wiped out partition 10 again and was going to copy partition 9 to 10 (9 is 537MB/ext4/FACTORYFS)

So I ran a dd and got the following:

dd if=/dev/block/mmcblk0p9 of=/dev/block/mmcblk0p10
dd: writing '/dev/block/mmcblk0p10': I/O error
294913+0 records in
294912+0 records out
150994944 bytes (144.0MB) copied, 95.067387 seconds, 1.5MB/s

and again, locked up the phone. This *does* lend credence to the idea of something in hardware being bad with the eMMC chip. So how would I do a scan on an eMMC chip to see where the bad "sectors" are??
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] Mattheyu:
Does umounting the drive and running smartctl or fsck.ext4 provide any information?

Have you looked into mtd-utils? http://www.linux-mtd.infradead.org/
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] drnull:
We don't have a ext4 fsck (that I can see). Running e2fsck -cv /dev/block/mmcblk0p10 locks up though...
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] Mattheyu:
Are you running this on the device, or a host system? Looks like you can enter an adb shell and run a normal fsck on the device.

Also, edited my previous post.
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] drnull:
I'm running on device. I'm not sure how I would get the mtd-utils stuff running... would I need a cross-compiler setup?

EDIT:

I'm still playing with parted and creating different sized partitions. It seems anytime I make a partition down into the 1070MB-3070MB range, it locks up. I.e., the following parted commands all lockup:

mkpartfs DATAFS ext2 1070MB 3070MB
mkpartfs DATAFS ext2 1090MB 3070MB
mkpartfs DATAFS ext2 2090MB 3070MB

But this one worked:

mkpartfs DATAFS ext2 923MB 1066MB

But it's way too small.

So now I've tried removing 11 which was:

11 3070MB 15.4GB 12.4GB fat32 UMS

And giving 10 some of that "good" region of the MMC, and giving 11 back the rest:

mkpartfs DATAFS ext2 3070MB 5217MB
mkpartfs UMS fat32 5218MB 12.4GB

That seemed to work.
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] garwynn:
When you copied from 9 to 10, did it change back to ext4 or stay ext2?

Also, wonder if the steps listed here might be able to detect something wrong with the data superblock:

http://linuxexpresso.wordpress.com/2010/03/31/repair-a-broken-ext4-superblock-in-ubuntu/

Again, not well versed in Linux but doesn't seem hard nor does it appear to make the situation any worse than where you are... as long as you don't go past the fsck.

*Edit* Reading on some other Samsung models now to see if there's any similar issues. Only heard of an issue wiping a partition if something was being used in it, the workaround was to use mkfs.ext4 to recreate.
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] drnull:
It was ext4, but anytime I tried to mount it (or fsck it), the phone locked up.
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] Mattheyu:
I see no current cross-compiled binaries for mtd-utils and I can't find any info on mounting partitions on a local system via adb.

Looks like someone ported mtd-utils but never compiled it for Gingerbread. http://gitorious.org/android-on-freerunner/platform_external_mtd-utils

May have to compile and use adb to push it. http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/MTD_Utilities#MTD-Utils_Compilation
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] drnull:
And the new phone is in. I didn't think I'd be so disappointed that they got it in in less than a day. I really wanted to play around more with the broken one. Still might not pick it up till tomorrow. I've got more stuff I want to try on this one.
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] garwynn:
For comparison, here's EL29+rooted:

cat /proc/partitions
major minor #blocks name

179 0 15387648 mmcblk0
179 1 20480 mmcblk0p1
179 2 1280 mmcblk0p2
179 3 1280 mmcblk0p3
179 4 8192 mmcblk0p4
179 5 8192 mmcblk0p5
179 6 8192 mmcblk0p6
179 7 307200 mmcblk0p7
179 8 16384 mmcblk0p8
179 9 524288 mmcblk0p9
179 10 2097152 mmcblk0p10
179 11 12066816 mmcblk0p11
179 12 319488 mmcblk0p12

Looking for parted to push onto it...

*Edit* Another thought: Could a newer version of Busybox maybe fix the issue?
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] sfhub:
I used to have this card reader and the I/O controller had slight mismatches in voltage levels and timing. It was fine for reading and most of the time writes worked ok too, but eventually if you did lots of writes, like removing a source tree, it would crash the sdcard.

Based on all the past info and drnull's info, imo there is some change in the handling of emmc where if you wipe enough times you'll eventually damage the emmc, specifically the data partition area.

There may be other factors involved like specific emmc batches or emmc from some suppliers being more susceptible to this problem, but there is definitely a cause and effect with ics kernel and recovery doing partition writes.

I am sure if you have the energy, you can remap /data onto an area that isn't affected or even remap to external sdcard. This would require changes to the init scripts in the kernel and likely would get your phone functional again, but I think it is just an intellectual exercise, and most will want their phone replaced if they get in this situation
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] Mattheyu:
I had them ship my replacement, so I'll have ~two weeks with my old device. I think I'll give it a try. Could be useful for those without insurance. Wish I could find a way to mount the eMMC device directly on a host machine via adb.
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] D_A_M_A_G_E:
got my phone back from Samsung ...it is my phone and they did indeed fix it....the report said bad bda......replaced pda...hope this helps ...I am assuming bda is boot data area......pda ...partition data area ???
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] Mattheyu:
Any chance I could get you to scan the report or take a decent picture so I could see it? I would be very appreciative.
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] D_A_M_A_G_E:
Actually reread original e-mail ....said bad BGA ....replaced PDA ...sorry e-mail was all I got....
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] sfhub:
BGA usually refers to some interface to a chip.

It sounds like they replaced your motherboard
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] D_A_M_A_G_E:
I am just glad I got it fixed for free and it has been working flawlessly so far . Just wish we could nail this thing down for certain :(
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] Mattheyu:
The guy at Samsung that I talked to was really helpful. Maybe they would give you details if you asked? Not sure if they have access to the actual repair information though.

The tech who worked on my phone wasn't there when I picked it up. The rep who returned my phone said that he thinks the tech tried to push the official to the device, but when it failed, the system flagged it as having an unofficial firmware. Interesting since I pushed the EL29 stock before returning it. I'm flashing EG30 stock to it right now, and then I plan on pushing a Rogue recovery and attempting to access it through adb.

At the very least, I hope to dd the internal storage to an SD card. There are things on there... :o
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] Mattheyu:
Exact same partition table that I have. I'm getting constant i/o errors.Can;t even mount /emmc, let alone copy most things to the storage card.
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] garwynn:
Bump

Bumping to keep this near the top. Hope this gets stickied at some point...
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] timzentu:
Dumb Question

I have this same problem, and have been reading the feed. I was curious if flashing a different pit file that would intentionally corrupt the /data partition, and then using the proper pit file would possibly cause the /data partition to get repaired when you re-flashed it. (or would that brick it beyond all repair.
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] brennam7:
give it a shot. can't make a brick anymore brickier
[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] Mattheyu:
So, I think I'm giving up. A solid day of constant I/O errors and I think nothing short of a complete rewrite of the device will fix the issue. Replacing the MBR didn't work, and anything else is an I/O error. I'm willing to listen to any suggestions.