[AT&T, Rogers, Bell, Telus Samsung Galaxy S III] o4tuna:
i747 AT&T 4.3 ota

Ok, just went through some of this, wanted to share my experience, hopefully it'll help somebody...

i747 AT&T 4.3 ota.

So this was a friend's phone.

About a year ago, she tried to root it, doesn't remember which method, but said rootchecker says it was unsuccessful.

She ran into financial difficulty & couldn't afford AT&T anymore, was using it as a tablet. I traded her a big $50 tablet straight across for it. :laugh:

She did a factory reset to it just before she gave it to me. It was now stuck on the AT&T deathstar logo screen.:(

google google

Tried a bunch of different things, finally ran across instructions that said to pull the batt, sd card & sim card, then hold the power button for 2 minutes. That worked.:o

Tried to unlock the sim right away, the free unlock didn't work, that's when I found out about the 4.3 ota.:crying:

(Has any one considered legal action? Seems like they're putting this on phones that are privately owned & permanently borks them)

So anyways, bought a code off ebay, from xcular_team. I chose them because their instructions are awesome. You can actually go to their auctions & save the pdf instructions file. It's very detailed & gives several different methods, in case the first try doesn't work. Mine actually took 4 tries...

Got it unlocked & signed up with metro-pcs, on the unlimited plan. They lock tethering out? :crying:

google google

Putting an alternate rom would help, but 4.3 makes that a pain...

Used cwm usb tether for a while. Works, but s l o w ...

So, I tried to use the recovery menu to load CM11. Signature error.:(

google google

Ahhhh, you have to install an alternative recovery menu.

I'm running linux mint, so I followed the instructions for doing that from the command line. Never gave me the status bar on the phone. Terminal responses all seemed ok, but nothing going on in phone.

Now, it won't go into recovery menu at all.:crying: Gets the download menu, but no recovery menu. Tried the cwm rom manager app, never completes.:crying:

So I'm kinda stuck.

Was discussing this with a friend, talking about 4.3 & knox. He's trying to tell me the s3 doesn't have knox, it's a hardware modification, they couldn't possibly install that in a software update. So I'm googling some stuff to show him how far off base he is, & come across a thing that says, supersu has the ability to disable knox now.

I've been getting occasional error popups about supersu stopping. Must be a left over from when she tried to root it. But I figure, "what the heck, worth a try" & install super su. First thing it asks me is if I want to disable knox. Ummmmm yes.:cool: Install rootchecker & it sez yep.:cowboy:

So I try the recovery menu again. It works!!:cowboy::cowboy:

I already had the CM11 file on my sd card, so I selected it & told it to give it a try....

Hey that's purdy!

Wifi Tethering now works, no upsell screen.:cool::laugh:

Downloaded & installed the gapps package, starting to look like a phone...

A couple questions, somewhat off topic:

Is it possible to re-install any of the Samsung apps on top of CM11? Like the camera?

Are there any speed tweaks that work with this phone/CM11?

I had a ZTE Warp, woem rom/overclocking/adrenoboost made it almost twice as fast as stock...