[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] imethodZ:
Please Help....

I have a GSM galaxy nexus with the latest Slimbean 4.3 custom ROM. Recently my phone randomly started bootlooping. I was reading something on Flipboard when suddenly it rebooted for no apparent reason. When my phone restarted I was waiting for my widgets to load and after about 30s it rebooted again and now for the past two days it doesnt work for for more than 30s before it reboots. I tried to get into Trickster MOD to disable set on boot but I don't have enough time. I've tried everything suggested in all the threads without success.

Here's what I tried so far to fix my phone:

1. I have custom recovery TWRP 2.6.0.0 installed on my phone. I rebooted into recovery and tried to dirty flash Slimbean 4.3 build.1 and GAPPs again. But it continued to boot loop

2. Next I went to the wipe menu and did a factory reset wiping cache, dalvik and data (not data/media) then I reinstalled Slimbean 4.3 and GAPPs. surprisingly when I rebooted it was as if the factory reset did not work. All my apps my widgets and my customizations were still there. I didn't go through the android initial setup process that you normally go through when you do a clean wipe, and my phone again started to boot loop.

3. I decided to forego any data that I have on my phone so I rebooted back into recovery and this time from the TWRP wipe menu I did a Format Data in the hope that it would wipe my phone completely. I expected it to wipe all my data, the ROM, everything except the bootloader and the recovery. Nothing was wiped. Even though I got a message saying success, when I rebooted the phone it booted back into Slimbean and all my apps and widgets and customizations were still there and it started to boot loop again!!

4. so I moved on to the next step. Using Nexus Root Toolkit v1.7.2 by WugFresh I decided to flash a Factory image on my phone first I tried to flash a TAKJU 4.3 JWR66Y factory image in bootloader mode using fastboot. Everything seem to succeed normally... radio.img, recovery.img, boot.img and userdata.img all seemd to proceed normally. After about 10 minutes of going through this I rebooted my phone and still nothing had changed. My phone booted back into Slimbean with all my apps and my widgets and my customization intact and it continued to bootloop again.

5. I repeated the above with a TAKJU 4.2.2 JDQ39 factory image. Again it seemed to complete successfully but when I rebooted it went back into Slimbean and I still had all my apps and my data and my customizations intact. My phone continued to boot loop.

6. I decided to try Odin to flash a factory image. I used ODIN3 v1.87 and loaded the i9250 PIT file to repartition my phone and I loaded a TAKJU 4.3 md5 file under PDA. The process completed successfully showing a bright green pass. When I rebooted my phone keeping my fingers crossed nothing had changed. Slimbean, all my apps, all my widgets, my data and the bootloop were all still there!!

7. I tried the same process with ODIN3 v3.07 however each time halfway through flashing system.img the process would fail and nothing would change.

Right now I'm completely flabbergasted and I don't know what else to try I wish there was a way to completely wipe my phone so that It would have no OS, no partitions, no data, a fresh clean slate that I could repartition and flash a factory image and proceed from there. I'm wondering if there is any tool out there that can do a low level format of the NAND so no trace of any OS or any data remains. Perhaps then I can flash a bootloader and a recovery and factory image. Even if someone could help me softbrick my phone so that it wouldn't boot up, it would be welcome change from this frustration that I'm experiencing. Any suggestions and any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

iMethodZ