[Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] caine0001:
First of all a quick question. Do you know which app it was that created the endless loop problem? I just would like to know.

Next, are you saying you flashed the update only, or did you flash a copy of a recovery created on another phone that had 4.1.2 already installed on it? I am somewhat confused about what you are saying. Here is my experience for what it is worth and others may have different experiences but here is mine:

Whenever I flash a different firmware to my phone, I lose my installed apps (which are on the phone storage not sdcard). I have to restore them using My Backup Pro (others use Titanium Backup). So when you flashed the 4.0.4 firmware, if it had been my phone, it would have meant reinstalling all my apps or restoring with a backup program. So I am not surprised that you lost data from storage on the phone. Also, once you had 4.0.4 on the phone, why didn't you just update to 4.1.2 OTA? Or is it no longer doing that update over the air from AT&T? It still was as of 2 weeks ago because I did it and AT&T told me it was still available. So did you try that? It would have saved your data and just updated it to work with 4.1.2 as it did mine. But if you hadn't reinstalled your apps while you had 4.0.4 on then I guess it doesn't matter since there wasn't anything to save. But if you did reinstall your apps with 4.0.4 on, then an OTA update would have preserved the data. Like I said earlier, I am not sure if you flashed just the update or if you flashed a complete recovery of 4.1.2 firmware, so I don't know what effect the flashing you did would have had. But I do know that flashing a complete new firmware would have gotten rid of your installed apps and you would have had to put them back on. That is my actual experience with my i437s. If I just do updates to a new firmware, my data is preserved and the phone automatically updates the apps to work with the new firmware.

As I have mentioned before to others, you can have root on your phone still, but not realize it because your apps can't get access. All you have to do to test it is to reinstall Superuser so that there is a program to grant the su access. Without the Superuser binaries you may be rooted but you won't get root access with programs like Root Checker because you need the Superuser (or equivalent app) to actually grant the permission to access as su. So try reinstalling Superuser and see if you can get root access. If not, your root is really gone, and I can't explain that since my i437 never has lost root no matter how many times I have flashed back and forth between firmwares.

Here is another suggestion. If you installed 4.1.2 and the new July 31st enhancement of it then I would try to get back to just 4.1.2 before the July 31st update is put on and see if you can use motochopper then. It is common knowledge that motochopper works with 4.1.2.

You may find other members with different experiences, I don't know. But everything I have told you is from actually doing it on 2 different i437 phones. But as I have come to realize, it seems that there are exceptions and different experiences even with same model phones.