[Galaxy S III Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] Jarmezrocks:
Hey guys n girls,

I don't mean to be necro-bumpin a thread like this but it is kind of relevant and I guess important especially for n00bs I guess? Like for most of them I think actually "it will read like diy brain surgery." I have no issues with reading hex or nothing but I decided to just try something. After following the instructions here I too was reporting a corrupted file system for the efs of this phone I am attempting to repair. The sad part for me was the fact that flashing to get root access in order to do the backup of nv_data etc WAS the cause of corruption that lead to loosing IMEI for this device :(

I read about everything before hand and I went about things carefully as the phone isn't mine....sure enough BAM goneskis and here I am. I did the checks on my exported damaged img file in Linux Mint and then flicked back over to Windows 7. Mint would not mount the image it would not do anything except report that it was stuffed basically.

But it's not all doom and gloom. There must be something else in the drivers of LinuxReader for Windows that allows corrupted file systems to appears normal? Anyway...I initially thought I was best off using another app made by the same company DiskInternals called Partition Recovery (paid licensed app - naturally I just ticked the box and chose trial after install) and I was able to see a somewhat corrupted file system where byte sizes of files and some of the contents of the recovery files seemed to "marry" up to the freshly generated EFS I created. Anyway it was a visual step closer than just plain hex. I only have my two I9305's as working devices and only one is rooted anyway so I was digging around down in my own EFS trying to see some commonalities because when the new EFS is generated there are a lot more files missing than what we are lead to believe with most of the tutorials here on XDA. I could see that too when comparing my new backup and current working I9305.

Here is the funny part though, I was getting annoyed trying to do a 3 way comparison of exported binary data text files from corrupt img, the new img and my personal phone img, naturally I like to Alt+Tab a lot, so I really wanted to have a second instance of Partition Recovery Open just so I could flick back between them.....I tried to open the x64Bit instance (it installs 2 for some reason? and more weird my Windows is 64bit and it launches 32bit by default? go figure?) anyway they have put heavy restrictions on the the functionality of the free app, so I decided meh I will just use Linux Reader its self as the other app to alt tab to when I want to get a visualisation of whats going on. So i did that. I opened it up not thinking anything of it I opened the corrupted img and it appears all normal like the image from I9305 so I automatically assumed I opened the wrong image. 3 times I reopened it and there is nothing wrong with anything inside when viewed with Linux Reader, no hisitations mounting? All files there 100% perfect!:victory:

Now all I have to do is click recover and export them and re-import them into the phone from the SDcard, set permissions and reboot :fingers-crossed:

Check this out. This is my corrupt EFS img