[Galaxy S I9000 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] Mangoniter:
Hello everyone,

I just hardbricked my SGS+ and now I'm a bit curious how this could happen.

This is what I did:

I used to run CM9 RC5 from arco68 along with the Kernel for ICS from Christopher83 and CWM 6.0.1.2.

Because my phone always lost the wifi-connection and also had some freezes I decided to try out CM10 Beta 3 from ivendor.

I backuped my phone, downloaded the zips and even verified the MD5sums. Next I flashed CWM 6.0.1.9 as recommended in the thread from ivendor.

After exporting the nandroid backup and other stuff like photos to my computer I wiped everything as mentioned in the thread, flashed the two zips and rebooted. Everything went fine and I was almost ready with setting up my phone again when I got my first softreboot.

Suddenly it showed the CM-bootlogo and after maybe 10 seconds I was back on my homescreen. I got another two or three softreboots until I decided to flash the Kernel 3.x from CastagnaIT.

I rebooted into recovery, wiped cache and dalvik cache, flashed the zip and rebooted.

Now I wanted to reboot into recovery again to fix permissions but instead I got a softreboot and my phone stuck at the CM10 bootlogo.

I waited for around 5 minutes and then I just turned the phone off and booted into the recovery mode.

Because I wanted a clean install without any problems like softreboots I decided to wipe my phone again (data, cache, system) and just reflash the zip for CM10. And at this point everything went wrong.

I flashed CM10 but when I tried to flash gapps my phone just turned off. And no, the battery was not empty. In fact the battery was at around 50-60% and my phone was also connected to my computer.

I tried to turn on my phone but now it stuck at the Samsung bootlogo.

The next thing I did was probably a horrible mistake. I tried to un-brick my phone but I did not realize that I could boot into download mode without problems so I guess my phone wasn't softbricked at all.

Well, after that I still stuck at the Samsung bootlogo and couldn't enter recovery mode. I got into download mode somehow and maybe this was my second mistake. I tried to flash the "i9001Reset.zip" via Odin. Everything went fine but when Odin said "Close serial port and wait until rebooting" my phone was completely dead. I think it was while I tried to flash the reset-file when I got a message like "MBR: read failed". So somehow I managed to destroy my master boot record.

Now I can't turn on my phone or enter download nor recovery mode. I already removed the battery for about 45 minutes but this didn't work either.

My phone is dead but at least I saved the important data and maybe I'll get a new one through warranty. Or I just buy a Nexus 4.

My questions are:

What did I do wrong especially when I tried to save my phone?

How can I prevent such things from happening?

And at which point I should have got help here in the forum or elsewhere?

I would really appreciate some tips for the future because I already flashed and used a lot of different ROMs but this is the first time something really went wrong.

Thanks for reading and thanks for your help in advance.

(Please excuse my non-perfect englisch.)

Greetings,

Mangoniter