[Galaxy S II Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] cembalaya:
Okay, So I am as NOOB as NOOB can be,

I got a used SGS2 (Bell/Virgin), I am on Telus so I figured, how hard can it be to unlock it instead of paying some dude to do it for me? (First mistake, and have been humbled every step of the way since!...)

Anyway I will try to keep this relatively short (it will be difficult)... ...I read a few things online and saw that I needed ODIN and a Rooting software, I originally used SuperOneClick, and to download the right insecure kernel to match my original one etc... ...problem is I obviously didn't read nearly enough when I started because I was almost done and then there was a hiccup when SuperOneClick said that I needed to enable SU in Kies. So I decided to go into Kies to try and do so but the instructions before I started Rooting said to put the phone in USB debugging mode. Apparently Kies doesn't see the phone if it is in that mode. Well by this time I can't get past the logo screen and this is where my downward spiral begins.

I then tried to unroot the phone to go back to stock but didn't really know what I was doing and then I read something about the cache needing to be wiped and then after that I read that maybe my OS was wiped. So at this point I did lots of reading (what I should have done in the first place) and most of anything useful I found was on XDA so that is why I am here. It seemed like yes, in fact my OS was wiped because of one of my not so S-M-R-T actions. So I fumbled through and found the right OS for my S2 and I had ODIN going strong and I had the OS loading, the green bar getting bigger in ODIN and the blue bar working it's way across the screen of my S2...I thought "finally!!, I rock!!"... ...then for some reason everything stopped! I had seen in a post that I had to uninstall Kies before doing anything, which I did...but I didn't see until after the fact that my anti-virus likely interfered (I didn't disable it for the process before I started).

At that point of course I was left with a phone that says "Firmware upgrade encountered an issue. Please select recovery mode in Kies & try again."

So then I was afraid to try anything else because many say to steer clear of Kies and also I had read that I may need a USB jig to be able to get it back into download mode because all I was getting was the "firmware upgrade issue" screen. I did make a USB jig with a resistance of 300K Ohms and I *can* get the phone into download mode. (Though another concern is that when I plug the USB jig in and it brings the phone into download mode, the counter is not reset and I read that that was supposed to be reset by the jig.)

So last night I got brave and decided to try and run ODIN and to have another attempt at installation of OS. Now I can get ODIN to detect the phone, but I put the I9100MUGLD3_I9100MBMCLD3_I9100MXXLD3_HOME.tar.md5 file into the PDA section of ODIN and it starts and gets to the part where it says loading firmware or something and then bootload.bin and it stayed like that for like, an hour and then I gave up, fearing that I am just going to screw it up even more.

So now I decided that I am not even close to knowing what to do next but every time I found anything to move forward it was on this site so I figured I may as well join the site since I have been here so often. Now I am hoping for some kind of miracle...so, in advance, please please please and thank you thank you thank you all for your input. (Sorry for the length of this I just wanted to get all the info I could into this)