[Galaxy Note II Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] AlliterationArtiste:
Hi all. This is by way of advice, information and a question.

I have a 7105 on contract and it got dropped. It was rooted but running stock 7.1.1 and was fine for months and months before I cracked its screen. My contract covers accidental damage so I got a new one. Thanks to the excellent guidance with various Android phones over the years from this forum I've happily rooted, hacked and generally mucked about with loads of HD2s and my 7105 and never had a problem.

Until now :)

When the new phone came I just dived right in. Rooted ok. Started to use Titanium backup to restore apps. All going well until I got to Flight sim game. In the middle of the restore, the phone rebooted and when it came back up it was in factory mode. You lot being by far the best source of advice I hunted this down in the forums and found a nice solution to fix it by modifying the keymgr and factorymode text files in the FactoryApp folder in efs. My problem was that I couldn't alter factorymode. It was in fact corrupt along with a number of other files. I'm sure you can imagine the panic! To cut a long story short. A day of intense hacking got me nowhere because I panicked and started flashing this and flashing that all to no avail.

After a sleepless night I turned to my own fledgling knowledge of Linux and using ADB I connected to the phone whilst it was in restore mode and used e2fsck to repair the efs partition. Once repaired I was out of factory mode! But the problems didn't end there.

I then ended up with what I would historically call video ram errors. Random crap appearing on the display. Coloured flashing lines across the screen etc. I couldn't fix this so I had to do the best I could to restore the machine to normal with TriangleAway. Unroot and generally get it back to factory condition before returning it as a faulty replacement.

So Advice: always back up your EFS folder. Even if you aren't flashing new roms! If you just root it then anything can happen!

Information: If your EFS folder is corrupt (this is from memory so forgive me if I'm not 100% right. Should be close enough though) start your phone in restore mode, connect with ADB, set permissions to root via su and then run e2fsck on the efs device. It's in /dev/block/something. if anyone really needs this I can probably dig it out of my current working phone :)

When using e2fsck there are two parameters you need. The first does the repair. the second important one is to force a repair even though the superBlock says all is well. For me this fixed factorymode file and several others.

My question is this: Could I have just been unlucky and genuinely had faulty hardware? The lines on screen and peculiar display behaviour in all screens from the bootup display right through to wallpaper in the shell were clearly indicative of video ram from experience but could a file in the EFS folder determine video subsystem parameters perhaps? So a corrupted file in the EFS file system was setting up the video hardware incorrectly?

Would be really interested to get some views on this

all the best to you out there and - as always - thanks for all the help and advice over the years.