[Galaxy S 4 Mini Android Development] Nil Einne:
Successful on my 16GB I9195

I decided from http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1671969 to do the later.

In other words I used the main firmware file I9195XXUAMH5_NO_CSC_I9195XXUAMH5_ROOT_ODEX.tar.md5 (extracted) as PDA or actually AP since I'm using ODIN 3.0.9 and with CSC_OXAAMH3.ta​r.md5 as CSC. I actually turned off auto reboot (I prefer to leave it off when doing firmware stuff so I can be more confident nothing went wrong) but left on f. reset time. Nothing else was turned on, particularly re-partition which everyone agrees is a bad thing if turned on. It went fine. I convinced phone to reset manually after finishing (I forgot how long you need to hold down the power button).

Then restarted my phone and I had a minor panic when I my phone vibrated a few times with nothing on the screen and then booted up with something about recovery but I'm guessing that's normal, part of the process of finalising the update. (I think I've had similar minor panics before when updating.) Anyway then it booted up fine with a Samsung logo rather than a Telecom NZ (telco branding) logo as before and did some app optimisations.

It seems to be working fine even on my 16GB phone, At least no problems so far. Still showing 16GB etc and expected amount of free space.

Only strange thing, although the CSC from the *#1234# menu is I9195OXAAMH3 (cf old I9195TNZAMG2) and in Kies it shows MH3 version for my CSC compared to the former MG2, Kies also still says TNZ and of course says my device can't receive updates. I dunno it it's intentional or something is not quite right with my CSC. It's not a big deal since I don't care about Kies anyway and obviously don't want to update with it. Perhaps it's nothing wrong with the phone and Kies is either polls a server to find out what my CSC should be from my IMEI or has a record on my computer my phone is TNZ and so refuses to think of it as something else. I may be able to work out myself, just wanted to mention it here for completeness.

Main point, I can finally restore old apps using Titanium Backup! Helium is okay but having to connect to computer every time my phone shuts down is annoying. And it doesn't help me with my existing backups which were all TB.

Thanks for hand holding etc. Only phone I ever used and rooted before was my LG P500 and that was a while ago and I only used official firmware and the auto root tools. Well actually I also did fool around with a cheap Chinese tablet including upgrading firmware but by the time I was using that thing it wasn't worth much so I didn't care much.

Thanks all.

P.S. Thanks to Sound Hound I've finally identified (after several tries, my humming isn't great) the familiar tune that's part of the great music by Michael Huang for the American map of Ticket To Ride as Red River Valley. A popular folk song and cowboy music standard, somewhat as I expected (I was thinking it would be Western or similar). Which incidentally has also I think become a popular Chinese and possibly Japanese folk song, so I'm not sure if I heard it from the English side or Chinese side or both. I guess I didn't need to restore Sound Hound (or Shazam) from backup but I preferred not to lose my history.