[Galaxy S I9000 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] indielectric:
fixed - ICS install issue

That's sweet, Kelowna is a nice area :>

Well, I worked my butt off for almost two weeks, 4 hours a night.

I should start off by saying I still cannot boot to Clockwork Recovery with any button combination, i've tried all the usual suspects and then some atleast 50 times, probably way more. The only way I can is once in awhile a miracle occurs and it reboots to Clockwork Recovery 5 (the blue text themed one), or if I install CF-Root and use to reboot into recovery in it's options.

I should also mention that whenever I do get into Clockwork Recovery, it's like version 3, with the orange text theme. And I don't know if it helped, but I am now using Odin 1.87 instead of 1.85.

I was finally able to flash stock by flashing the 4 separate files, 512 Pit, PDA, Phone, and CSC rather than flashing the UGK3homebinary.tar.

I tried multiple different versions of Gingerbread with CF-Root to try to get ICS or CM9 working, JVT, JW1, JVU, all of them worked, but the same thing happened when going to install ICS, and even CM9, the install would start, once it got to the part where it says "Rebooting if necessary" on the ICS or CM9 install, it would reboot, show the install beginning again, then reboot at the same spot, infinitely. I made sure to try atleast 50 times so I could bypass the suggestion of trying again.

During this process the phone was acting very buggy, you know what I mean, restarting, freezing, force stops, mounting storage issues. I went into the options and set the phone to factory default, also during another miracle one time it booted to the stock android recovery, you know the one with like 4 options. Format, Wipe, go back, reboot. I formatted and wiped from there as well. These two things seemed to help alot, and the phone was less buggy and more willing to receive my treatments.

After browsing some more, I found this kernel cleaner, i'm surprised no one in the forum mentioned it to me, perhaps they were angry I hadn't discovered it on my own. In any case it's called 'Ultimate Kernel Cleaning Script - 4.0 [MIUI/CM7 and SAMSUNG]', there is one for Samsung Roms and one for CM roms, and all you do is run it to clean out the old before installing ICS. Link: http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1166954

Ok, so I am now I am excited, this tool looks like my answer. I flash stock, install JVT rom with CF-Root for JVT, (I run my sweet kernel cleaner zip I found) and go for ICS 4.0.3 install.....and same thing happens, sigh. Flash stock again, and oh what's this? I found another custom ICS Rom I can try, remICS http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1687727

Ok, so I flash stock again, install JVT, CF-Root for JVT, install remICS and....D'oh! Same thing, it's rebooting........but wait, this time it's rebooted into Clockwork Recovery 5 on it's own without any keypress, instead of looping. What a great time for that Miracle! (This only happened 3 times in about 60 hours of working on the phone!) Ok, but what to do now? Well, ICS didn't really install, it just started to, maybe i'll try to restart the install from in here! Choose install zip, this time I chose remICS only because so far it had the lesser fail rate - I didn't want to mess up this golden opportunity, I know it's just a different version of Clockwork popping up, but when anything different than the same failures happens, you don't want to waste it. It's installing....complete! Do I dare risk installing a customer kernel and destroying all of my progress? Yes! Install Semaphore 1.2.6 for ICS, working great!

So, I don't know if it was the kernel cleaner, the remICS, or the miracle Clockwork 5 boot, but I don't want to take anymore chances, that's how I got here, fiddling with what's working great already.

I probably didn't need to post this, but I wanted to recount my experience for anyone else having a similar problem. I have now been running stable with all my apps installed for 12 hours. I would like to have stock ICS with phone rooted, but I don't want to take any chances. This remICS custom rom is very nice, speedy and alot of the bloatware removed, along with some killer SGS3 menus and layout.

I would like especially to thank my Canadian friend for helping me :victory: