[Galaxy S I9000 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] shams94:
Hello,

I've owned a Samsung Galaxy S for about 2 years and it recently started to give me problems. Before having the problems I'm going to describe I never rooted or flashed this phone.

It started a few months ago when I restarted my phone, it went to the initial screen with the "Galaxy S / GT-I9000" white text and instead of going to the next screen it just went black and returned to the same screen. I was afraid it would endlessly loop like this, but it didn't. After around 5 minutes it was able to start the phone like usual (I did nothing that could have fixed it, I just kept watching it while it looped and suddenly it didn't loop). After that, with the phone turned on, everything worked just fine.

This problem didn't go away, everytime I restarted my phone it would just sit there looping for what seemed to be a random amount of time (from 4-5 minutes to about an hour) until it was able to turn on. So I decided to try to fix this problem.

I don't know much about smartphones so my first idea was to try and reset the phone to factory settings (In Settings->Privacy if I recall correctly). I did this a few days ago and I guess it didn't help much, since when it restarted after the reset it kept trying to boot for more than an hour before I just removed the battery and came online looking for solutions.

The first solution I encoutered (on this forums) was this one: http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=2247484

I followed it and flashed the Semaphore .tar file in my phone. After that, booting in recovery mode would lead me to the CWM Recovery v6.0.1 menu where I was supposed to Partition the SD Card (That's what I understood from that thread).but the problem was that i couldnt even mount the /sdcard folder. (Nor the /data and /emmc folders). At this time I was only following the instructions and didn't really understand much of what was happening so I skipped to the next step, Install the firmware (I9000XXJVU_I9000OXAJVU_OXA.zip).

So this time I placed the pit file and the 3 other files that were inside the .zip I mentioned above in Odin and flashed my phone. This proccess went OK and after the phone rebooted it seemed to be installing something and gave me an error: "Failed to mount /sdcard (File exists)" (I actually found a picture in this forum with the exact same screen.

Now I was totally lost and "without" a phone, and it was actually really late and I needed to sleep. So I tried to repeat the previous steps, I returned to CWM but it still couldn't mount the /sdcard so I couldnt format or partition it. I cleared the cache and tried to install the firmware again. This time, surprisingly, it worked! After the flash the phone rebooted and was able to boot into android in the first try.

I used the phone for about a day thinking all the problems were gone but they weren't. The following day I rebooted the phone and found myself back in the boot loop. It went eventually turned on after around 15 mins but I realized I was back at the starting point.

So this time I tried another solution, since I thought the problem was in the sdcard i used SDFormatter (in Windows) and, with the phone USB connected to my laptop, I formatted the internal sd_card (I found this solution in another topic, also in this forums). After this I turned the phone off and when I tried to boot it I was back to the loop, I didn't feel like waiting so I just went back to the first solution (this time with the internal sdcard formated) and it made a difference, this time I was able to mount the /sdcard in the CWM recovery menu and was also able to partition it (according to the instructions from the solution I posted). When the partition was done I tried to flash the firmware and it worked perfectly, It booted and I was able to use it, but it wasn't detecting the internal storage, it only had the system storage (In Settings->SD card...). I found this really weird and was about to reboot the phone when it simply crashed and rebooted (It happened when i tried to turn on Wi-fi). Obviously I ended up on the boot loop again.

So now I've returned to the CWM Recovery and I can't mount /sdcard, /data and /emmc. I tried to flash the firmware I was using but now I get the same error I was getting before and trying it again doesn't seem to work (I guess I was really lucky before). I've checked the log and this is what happens when i try to mount those folders (I don't know much about Android so I don't know if this is useful):

W:failed to mount /dev/block/mmvblk0p1 (No such file or directory)

Error mounting /sdcard!

W:failed to mount /dev/block/mmvblk0p2 (No such file or directory)

Error mounting /data!

W:failed to mount /dev/block/mmvblk1p1 (No such file or directory)

Error mounting /emmc!

I've been searching for another people with similar problems and it has led me to believe that the internal sdcard is dead, but I don't know. If it was dead it probably wouldnt boot at all but in my case it just takes a while (sometimes a "long while") to boot, I can't confirm if it boots now since I can't even install the new firmware. The solution I found for these people was to use an external sdcard and divide it into 2 partitions etc, I can try to do that but first I wanted to know if there is another way to come back from this problem? Is the internal sdcard the problem?

Thanks for reading

TL;DR: Phone used to be stuck at boot loop before turning on (took from 5 minutes to 1 hour), I tried to fix it, Formated internal sdcard using SDFormatter, seemed to be working fine but phone crashed and was back on boot loop, now I am on CWM Recovery and can't mount /sdcard,/data,/emmc. I don't know what is the problem.

EDIT: I just turned my phone off and started it again in recovery mode and surprise! now I can mount the /sdcard, I dont know why this happens. One moment I am in CWM Recovery and can't mount it, I turn it off and back on and now I can.