[General Questions and Answers] StefanDO:
Hi folks!

Sorry I'm posting this here, as I only found out after registration that for the first 10 posts I'm not allowed to post to the original Encryption Unsuccessful thread. :(

So here is my story about my SGS, Gingerbread, ICS, the Encryption Unsuccessful message and Jelly Bean – maybe this is of some help.

First of all my conclusion (for those who want to know more – read the story after conclusion). Note that this refers to SGS – I don’t know about other devices. The Encryption Unsuccessful message appears on ICS when the /data partition fails (can’t be mounted / accessed anymore – hardware issue). Other partitions may be failing, too. The failure may happen both after cold start of the device and suddenly while running. In the latter case, you may also get this message on Jelly Bean. BUT: If vital partitions fail at cold start of the device, Jelly Bean would not start booting until Encryption Unsuccessful message. Instead, it starts recovery mode. From there it may help to select restart of device – at least for me, after a few attempts, Jelly Bean starts normally (because finally the partition(s) could be mounted). If mounting of partitions fails on Gingerbread at cold start, Gingerbread keeps restarting the device (instead of entering recovery mode) until the partitions could be mounted successfully – and then Gingerbread starts normally. However, if partition(s) fail while Gingerbread is already running, system may hang or slow down (can’t say because it never happened to me).

Solutions I can think of:

1)	Patch ICS to also enter recovery mode instead of booting if vital partitions could not be mounted. This way it behaves like Jelly Bean and at least doesn’t throw the Encryption Unsuccessful message after cold start (which – at least for me – is the only situation in which I get that message). Maybe one could even patch ICS / Jelly Bean to enter a boot loop like Gingerbread until the partition(s) could be mounted. This is – of course – not a real solution, because sooner or later the internal memory may fail completely. Especially because of the risk of data loss, solution 2) is to be preferred (but more difficult).

2)	Somehow manage not to use the internal memory (at least not the failing parts of it). That means everything – apart from the /boot partition, which doesn’t seem to be affected – should be located on an external micro SD card. The problem: It’s not enough to swap mounting of internal and external SD card by changing the vold.fstab file. At least for me, during installation of Jelly Bean, vital partitions were still created on the internal memory. But maybe I did something wrong? It looks like if the internal memory is *completely* failing (so unlike my case), this may however work – see youtube -> watch?v=zdMhYYdMB08

If anyone knows how to make Android boot from external micro SD card – please let us know.

The story:

About half a year ago, my SGS (Gingerbread) suddenly went into a boot loop when I switched it on. After several attempts (reinsert battery etc.), it worked again. By time this and that wasn’t working properly anymore – settings gone, apps crashing, lags… As restarts didn’t help, I decided to flash ICS. This has worked until a few weeks ago. The battery went down and after the device switched itself off automatically, I inserted another battery, tried to start – and: Encryption Unsuccessful message. I thought maybe it didn’t properly switch itself off so that the internal memory didn’t get enough power and, consequently, data got corrupted. So I flashed ICS again. 3 days later, after I had turned the SGS off for about 2 hours, I got Encryption Unsuccessful message again. As I read that maybe only one person so far experienced that message on Jelly Bean, I flashed that one. Worked fine the first few hours, but then after device was switched off again for some time, it went to recovery mode at startup. Only after some restarts it finally booted Jelly Bean (which was then running without problems). At this point I was convinced that it’s a hardware issue (failure of internal memory). As warranty was still valid, I decided to flash stock ROM (Gingerbread) and updated it to 2.3.6 via Samsung Kies (as earlier, it went into a boot loop after cold start) and sent it to Samsung service (a company called w-support was supposed to repair the device). They only replaced the LCD (for whatever reason) and applied a software update. When I got it back, as expected, symptoms had not changed. The thought of sending it in again without a replacement of internal memory or mainboard really frustrated me. So I tried to make Jelly Bean use an external micro SD card instead of the internal by changing vold.fstab. It worked with respect to swapping USB memory and external memory. But it didn’t make Jelly Bean install on the external micro SD card. And that’s where I am now. I would love to get all the vital partitions installed on the external card – but that doesn’t happen. Anyone has any advice? I tried to do it the way described in the youtube video (see above), except that I didn’t want to install Linux just for repartitioning the micro SD card. So I used SD Formatter and MiniTool Partition Wizard Home Edition. I would have preferred to partition the external SD card using CWM, but V3.0.0.5 seems to be somehow buggy – it got that option, and within a second it says “done”, but nothing has happened to the external SD card.

Has anyone managed to install ICS or Jelly Bean on an external SD card?

Thanks a lot in advance!