[AT&T, Rogers, Bell, Telus Samsung Galaxy S III] dstruct2k:
Hi everybody!

I figure we should have a thread dedicated to telling horror stories about flashes gone wrong. Whether it's because of power failures, bad USB cables, poorly labeled packages, or pure user error, we've all had that moment of worry: "Did I just turn my device into a paperweight?":eek:

It's my hope that, by sharing these stories, we can help each other realize that we're all human, we all make mistakes, and most mistakes can be recovered from. Don't be afraid to share your stories; we can't learn from each other's mistakes if nobody talks about them!

_____________________________________________

My first story is from my Telus SGS3 (I747

M

, you'll see why that matters in a moment) and is definitely a user-error kind of story.

I've been playing around with CM10 and its derivatives for the past month or two (got my SGS3 on release day and it wasn't running Samsung software 3 hours later) and I'm not new to Android, having run XDAndroid on my HTC Diamond, and bouncing between CM7 and CM9 on my Milestone. The first thing I did when I got my SGS3 was a full block device backup using DD from the command line, which is the only reason I don't have a paperweight today.;)

I decided to try out Paranoid Android over a week ago and I've been loving it, so I haven't been flashing much lately. But, when I got back from vacation and saw that CM10 had gone into nightly builds, I couldn't resist the temptation to try a clean install. :D I've got folders on my SD card for ROMs, GApps, kernels, recoveries, and anything else flashable just to make my life easier. Apparently at some point I downloaded an AT&T (I747, no M) modem, stuck it in a "/modems/" folder with the rest of my flashables, but realized that it wouldn't work on my device, so I never used it. I then promptly forgot that I had put it on the SD card, and it had a fairly cryptic filename. Away I went, flashing CM10, GApps, a nice bootscreen, and... the modem.

Dammit. :crying:

At this point, I was running the newest CM10 build, but with a borked modem. I thought I had fallen victim to the IMEI bug that's been going around, but then I remembered something about that modem file not being usable on a Telus device... And had no idea how to get back to a working state. I already knew that none of my nandroid backups would have the modem in them, and the only "stock" flashables I could find were rooted kernels and a nearly-700MB "stock" package that wouldn't download any faster than 10 kb/s. I couldn't wait 20 hours for a download, I wanted my phone now!:mad: I tried using Odin with a few of the TAR packages I found, but that only made my situation worse to the point of failing to boot entirely, even restoring a nandroid wasn't helping anymore.:eek:

I started digging through the forums in the hope that someone had ripped the Telus modem into a CWM flashable zip, but had no luck. I tried both the Rogers and Bell modems with the same results. That's when I remembered that I had done a block backup, but I had no idea which block device was the modem, and my phone wouldn't even boot up to let me MTP the files over. I was left with CWM recovery as my only option, and had to ADB push 2.5 GB of .img files to the SD card, and DD them one at a time through the ADB shell.

Somehow, it all worked out, and I was back to running Stock Touchwiz with root, and was then able to restore a nandroid from yesterday and amazingly enough Paranoid Android booted up, happy as ever, and in came my emails and text messages. I know I'm lucky that my IMEI didn't get lost in that mess, but it just goes to show that there's no such thing as a backup being "too extensive". You never know when "mmcblk0p99" needs to be replaced with a known working copy. ;)