[Samsung Galaxy Gio GT-S5660] sinisterstuf:
Tried a lot more things, none of them worked

Sorry for double-posting, but this is long.

Update:

I got a USB cable. I tried a lot of stuff that also doesn't work. That's what's covered in this post:

This doesn't work. Naturally the first part doesn't work because it says boot into recovery and I can't do that. Ignoring that and continuing from step 5 does just as little. At the bottom of this post I've written what Odin does.

This also doesn't work, it's basically the same thing.

Tried reinstalling stock ROM as suggested. No difference in results. List of ROMs I've tried at bottom of post.

Tried using Odin from a different PC, as suggested. More on this at bottom of post.

Tried flashing using flash_image in adb. More about that at bottom of the thread.

Tried to get fastboot to work. I get an infinite < waiting for device >. More on that at bottom of the post.

Tried to factory reset the phone using both the menu option in settings, and the dial code, both result in the phone turning off and then starting up with a blank black screen that stays there forever.

Tried taking the battery out a thousand times, seriously why is this suggested so often?

List of Recovery ROMs I've tried:

signed_cwm-5.0.2.7-flashablezip-ext4only.zip

cwm-5.0.2.7-ext4only-odin.tar.md5

cwm-5.0.2.7-ext4+rfs-odin.tar.md5

stockrecovery-DXKT4-odin.tar.md5

All coming from this thread.

Also one or two others from blog about clockworkmod etc.

The point is it has no effect because as far as I can tell it isn't even flashed anyway.

Flashing from fresh PC failed

What I mean by this is:

I took a different PC

did a fresh install of windows on it

installed the Samsung drivers using the Kies CD

put the phone in download mode (VolDown+Home+Power)

start Odin, select OPS and tar.md5 file

connect phone

run Odin

nothing special happens…

What Odin does:

copy image to phone → success

disconnect from COM port and wait for reboot

start countdown timer

at this point phone reboots normally (not recovery or anything) and nothing special happens, the Odin timer eventually time's out and the operation is finished

Update: added actual output from odin as an attachment.

I'm not sure but I don't think the above is what Odin is typically supposed to do.

The odin I'm using is 4.42 for Gio and comes from the threads linked to in the first 2 bullet points linked above.

How flash_image fails

I have tried using both adb and terminal emulator on phone. Root access is given to the emulator via superuser app. This is what I do:

su
cd system
flash_image recovery recovery.img

This is what I get:

error scanning partitions: No such file or directory

recovery.img is located in /system/recovery.img

flash_image is located in /system/bin/flash_image with proper chmod setting of 755.

It makes no difference if I mount the system as read/writeable or not.

The flash_image I'm using comes from CyanogenMod wiki, here.

My best guess here is that the reason flash_image finds no recovery partition is that there isn't one. I certainly don't see one. And this would also explain why the phone does nothing (black screen or samsung logo) when you try to boot to recovery.

Please dear God somebody tell me that one of you has seen this before and knows a solution for this?

According to this thread the partition where recovery.img resides is /dev/block/bml9, but how do I get my CWM recovery.img on that partition? Do I cat? dd? What? Is there any partition (e.g. that one, or /system or anything) that I should format to something strange before this will work?

Issues with fastboot

2 problems with this. First one is, how exactly do you get into "fastboot" mode on the phone? I don't even know if it can. I have uncovered the following startup key-combos:

recovery mode (Home+Power) does not work, so now just a blank screen

download mode (VolDown+Home+Power)

ramdump arm9 mode (VolUp+Home+Power)

emergency download mode (VolDown+VolUp+Home+Power)

LK Little Kernel Mode (VolUp+VolDown+Power)

blank screen (VolUp+Power)

blank screen (VolDown+Power)

regular boot (Power) doesn't work after attempting hard reset, only results in samsung logo and inability to boot

None of these seem to be fastboot mode, so I guess it's more complicated than that.

Other problem is I'm using Linux and I've read I'll need to configure Udev to detect the phone ID used when in fastboot mode.

I've read that some people who couldn't flash with flash_image in adb were able to flash using fastboot so I'm hoping for that.

Summary

As you guys can see I've really tried a lot of things. Everything I can think of, and everything I could find on XDA and the rest of the web. I have had no success. Like OP's topic title says, I still have a working phone. When Hard Reset fails and the phone becomes unbootable I can make it bootable again by using Odin to fail at flashing a recovery.

So the phone actually works fine. The problem is I can't get to recovery mode and therefore can not flash CyanogenMod (all CyanogenMod threads say to flash ClockworkMod Recovery before CyanogenMod).

Please can somebody help me with this, I don't know what else to try.

Edit: hey pakistanish, thanks for the suggestions, if I don't install the USB drivers from the Kies CD then where am I supposed to get them from?