[Galaxy Note GT-N7000 General] hg42:
so, you didn't answer my question: did you ever use a Samsung ICS kernel?

And additionally: did you use an old CWM recovery with, that is one from the times before the emmc problem was known to the community?

The emmc brick is only triggered by this software combination when using wipe functions.

The emmc brick is very unlikely nowadays. There is no current software that triggers the bug.

But may be you used some old files in the process (again: Samsung-ICS-kernel + old custom recovery + wipe).

Or may be you have triggered the bug in former times but it didn't affect your phone until now (because of the wear-level-algorithm).

I assume you don't have an emmc brick but some other kind of problem.

May be your hardware (memory chips etc.) has gotten problems.

You generally have to separate some things:

* the contents of the partitions (file systems)

this is about file systems like ext4, fat32, or special flash file systems or read only file systems etc.

File systems are some logical structure written to the raw partitions.

If they get corrupted, the partition seems to be "damaged", which means they cannot be mounted and are therefore unusable (you have to mount a file system to use it).

But this is not a kind of hardware damage, it's just that some bytes were written incorrectly to the file system.

This can happen, when the phone turns off (really, that means power is suddenly lost, e.g. like pulling the battery) while writing the file system.

Then some structures are written incomplete and some file system are corrupted then.

There are journal based file systems like ext4 that prevent the file system from becoming corrupted. This is a kind of two phase write algorithm, where the data structures are always complete. Only some written data can be lost, but the file system is always in a correct state (or can be corrected automatically at mount time from the journal).

ext4 is journal based, but ext2 or ext3 are not. I think most flash file systems are not journal based and fat definitely isn't.

The flash file systems on android like boot loaders or recoveries will never be written, only on creation time. So that's no problem.

* the partition structure (pit, partition tables)

this is used to tell the os where which partition is located in the memory area. The memory is "partitioned".

If the partition table is changed, the os cannot access the file systems on the changed partitions because it is reading at the wrong place.

If you rewrite(restore) the partition table to the former values, the partitions will be accessible again.

But note that some OSes like msdos or windows will write some bytes to the partitions when changing the partition table, so the partitions will have damaged areas after restoring the partition table.

The two fomer points are generally reversible, because it's all about logical structures which may be recreated or restored from backups.

But reconstruction may be restricted to hardware methods like JTAG etc. because you can only write to memory by software, if the device at least runs a boot loader or something that does the real writes for you.

Software like Odin talks to a minimal software on the phone like the "download mode" which executes commands on the phone.

If this minimal software doesn't run, the PC-Software cannot do anything on the phone.

Another method is some software on the phone (e.g. recovery) that has some user interface to write some package (e.g. a special zip format) to the phone memory and runs scripts.

* hardware failures

in rare cases you may get a hardware failure, e.g. something like the emmc bug or the memory getting too hot or applying to high voltage to the hardware (e.g. voltage spikes induced by lightnings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltage_spike).

Most of these failures are permanent (not reversible).

In some cases there are only some bytes changed and after restoring them everything would be ok.

But then you have to know where the bytes changed and you must have a backup etc.

Now, in your case it's very unclear what may have happened.

I doubt it is an emmc brick.

You said you cannot write a pit alone? That would be very bad, because the partition table (which is created by the download mode when "flashing" the pit) is the first part necessary to boot the phone. However, a correct table wouldn't make the phone unusable by itself.

But you cannot change the partition scheme and there must be a severe problem then.

Can you print the pit by using heimdall?

Btw. I finally repaired my N7000 by buying a cheap used N7000 with a broken display.

I simply swapped the mother board.