[Galaxy Note II Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] ZooBeastman:
Hi all, I've been reading through a lot of similar material recently to see if there's anything I can do to save my note.

On Tuesday I was happily sending some text messages, set the phone down and shortly after noticed it reboot in my peripheral. Didn't pay much attention and carried on my business (zombies needed killing). Some timelater I noticed it on the GT - 7100 boot screen and then it flickered off. It proceeded to keep doing this.

Concerned I put down my shotgun and had a bit of a look. I jacked it into the computer and the charge icon appeared but with no power showing and the erm 'spinny circle spinner' (for want of a better term) not being particularly 'spinny'. I attempted rebooting a few times with no luck, it seemed pretty deaded.

After reading around a bit (I'm a long time lurker on xda, but in honesty have very little to contribute :( ) I thought I'd give a number of techniques a go and see what happens (I had previously rooted and run a custom ROM on my note 1 without issue, but hadn't touched my note 2, neither rooted or custom ROMed).

First thing I attempted was a power/home/v-up to get into recovery - I'm not too sure what normal recovery looks like, I'd only ever used it on my note 1 previously with CWM installed (I wasn't even sure there normally is a recovery but no harm in trying eh?) anyway that failed miserably doing precisely nothing, can't get into recovery (if it exists).

Download however appeared available, so I thought I'd have a go at getting Kies to give me the latest firmware via its 'tools - firmware upgrade and initialisation' option. This seemed to do quite a lot of a while and then unfortunately fail, poo.

What next? Whipped out ODIN (hindsight may suggest this not as cunning as I thought) and tried to flash a stock ROM on. This gave me the seemingly quite ill omen of no pit partition. Scratching my chin and continuing to read I came across the full recovery toolkit with bootloader,code,csc,modem and pit.

Worth a punt I thought... so I punted. This seemed to have no effect, in ODIN3 3.07 this really didn't seem to do anything, I'm kicking myself because I can't remember the failure message but it didn't look too punishing, from memory it did very little and 'hung'. Reading a suggestion to use Odin3 1.75 I gave that ago. This seemed to do more but still failed again I can only offer my apologies in not being able to describe the error message; I suppose could run either of these again, I suspect it wouldn't make a difference anyway!

Randomly firing up the device and going into download mode for no real reason other than hope, I noticed something I considered odd. Now I'm not sure if this is my doing or not.... and if anyone thinks it might be that would be good to know.

Anyway at the top it says the following

ODIN MODE

PRODUCT NAME:

CUSTOM BINARY DOWNLOAD: NO

CURRENT BINARY: Samsung Official

SYSTEM STATUS: Custom

I fired up my good lady's device and her's has a product name and doesn't suggest the system status is custom.

I have a few queries that I would be grateful if they could be answered.

1) My device looks pretty dead, any ideas beyond the service centre? I was going to take it back to the Samsung Flagship store in Stratford London where I purchased the device on their pre-release day though annoyingly I don't have a filing system capable of dealing with receipts so am not particularly confident they will assist me, but I will likely try anyway (I certainly could print a bank record of the debit card payment).

2) Have I killed the product name and the system status or might this have already occurred? Afraid this is a complete who knows from me, I have a feeling it was like that the first time I went into download mode after it had died but I'm not certain. In which case should I expect (proof of purchase aside to not have a great experience with Samsung even though if I did kill the product name, it was after the device had already died).

If anyone has any thoughts, advice opinions please share.

Thanks for you're time.

- Tim