[Verizon Samsung Galaxy S 4] Surge1223:
I know I've said this before but sorry for how fragmented this thread is. Ill post a summary/ "get-up-to-date" section here and in the OP. This is complicated by the fact that at the beginning there was very little progress with such few people working on this and mostly consisted of me throwing out fringe ideas. Lately the numbers of individuals working on this has grown, to the point where its become a necessity for me to summarize whats happened so far.

1.

Figuring out what Hellsdroid's method was

- Unfortunately this seems unlikely as of now (figuring out what he did that is) On the other hand, [MENTION=5451468]TMcGrath50[/MENTION] and I discussed a method we thought to be similar to his starting around here and then I learned how to use ida better as time went on and recently disassembled that I9505 S4 USB repair tool. I have not done a thorough analysis of the pseudocode yet though. But even so, this method has never been done before (as far as I know) and  in addition to assuming the information in the pic below is true, and we can in fact reset the emmc on our devices with Secure Boot 3.0 (would this be a way of getting around having to reset the Secure Boot bit in the pbl to "0"?) I still think this idea needs to be refined a bit before its worth exploring because some questions remain in regards to if it would even work in the first place. For example, when a JTAG solution was tested previously, the VRUAMDK aboot.mbn didn't flash on a device with VRUAME7 after all the partitions were wrote over with VRUAMDK partitions via JTAG, why? [MENTION=2471504]jeboo[/MENTION] may be able to help answer that.

Also, it was previously questioned whether or not the flash programmer (APQ8064 hex) would need to be signed or not. As I have two S4's one thats working and one in QDL QHSUSB dload mode, in doing some recent testing through usb (S4 to S4) I was able to get some info back about my bricked S4, namely that I had sent it the wrong hex file ( see the last line here) because the dmesg and last_kmsg logs say something to the effect of "the the cpu clocks cannot start because its configured for the wrong device" and the last line from the my pastebin post says "8660" among other things as well.

Status

- Unknown - More Research Required

2.

Using a Developer edition S4 to unlock a retail S4

- So here's what we know, the dev kernel (boot.img) is flashable and will work with retail S4's, but the recovery.img and aboot will not. Flashing the dev recovery.img will succeed in Odin/Heimdall, but if you try to boot into recovery it will inform you that your device is "tampered" and and will void your warranty by setting the Knox warranty bit to 0x1. Before I discuss why aboot.mbn wont flash consider this; neither the Developer edition of the GS4 nor the Developer edition of the Note 3 has every received an OTA or a factory Odin tar. This is not by random chance. Every Developer edition owner has a unique MD5 for their aboot. If you couple this with the fact that Dev edition devices have retail stickers under their dev stickers, you will probably come to the conclusion that Samsung/Verizon/AT&T haven't released updates to dev devices because they would have to do it on a 'per device' basis, that or risk handing us a method to convert retail devices into developer edition devices. If the method by which Samsung uses device specific info to sign developer edition aboot partitions were discovered this may work, or if their method to determine if a device is a developer edition or consumer retail edition is similar to what Dan R (djrbliss) took advantage of then this could be a possibility.

3,4,5,6, coming up....updating...this will be a long post...advance warning.

Status

- Possibly - More Research Required