[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] reysonance:
HI,

I used to be more active in this forum, but honestly nowadays I can't found any reason to since everything has been smooth sailing for me without any problems—until this day, at least. Somehow I got my internal sdcard busted, it was pretty spontaneous, all I can recall is suddenly the system starts to reboot itself. Nothing much, I thought to myself, problem is the system keeps rebooting, it doesn't even last a minute. Naturally when faced with this problem one would do the usual procedure, namely completely format the thing to stock the rule out any possibility on the user side of things, but then this is the part when it starts to get interesting...

The thing refused to be formatted, seriously, it baffles me at first but it does

Things I've tried:

Fastboot, it hangs at writing system, whether I was doing it line per line manually or via the flash_all.sh script, I haven't tried the toolkit but I think it's safe to assume that It'll do the same thing. Even if it does go on (which it did, once) it doesn't do any sort of changes whatsoever to the system.

ADB, nope, not this one either. And since the system reboots faster before I can do anything worthwhile it's pretty much out of the question.

Recovery, multiple times I've tried nuking everything via CWM, nada. I've tried TWRP too, I have to boot it from fastboot since it apparently doesn't allow me to flash a new recovery either, it reverts back to CWM every time. Also tried to flash a different ROM (CM), that didn't work, it spits out an error message regarding some failure in changing metadata, thought it was a corrupted file or something, so I re-downloaded it, that doesn't work. Still convinced that it's corrupted I tried 4 different version of it without any luck. Even the one I had successfully flashed before. Interestingly enough, flashing the exact same ROM I'm currently using (ShinyROM) works, not that it seems to do anything.

Built-in data format from settings, now this doesn't work because I assume that it needs the stock recovery to work, which I couldn't flash because it wouldn't let me—in a sense that it flashes just fine on the command line—fastboot doesn't show up any error or anything—but it defaults back to CWM as soon as I reboot it.

Manually via terminal emulator/file manager, still nothing, curiously enough, Terminal Emulator indicates that the whole system is read-only (I tried making a file with it, it shows that exact message).

Grit my teeth, clench my fist and screams out every curse word that I know of, this somewhat reduced my stress levels, but ultimately yields nothing.

Which led to be believe that either my phone was either a) Haunted or b) Has a serious hardware problem, I'm leaning on the latter. A few quick lookup with my limited amount of Google-fu and I've found several threads that described the exact same issue:

http://forums.androidcentral.com/go...-factory-settings-no-matter-method-i-try.html

http://forums.androidcentral.com/go...eset-nexus-7-2102-using-multiple-methods.html

Both of which hints at it being a hardware problem. Which was my biggest fear since I can't really revert the phone back to stock now can I? Locking the bootloader doesn't seem to work either (the 'fastboot oem lock' command works just fine but just like every single thing I've tried, reverts back to my previous setup as soon as I did a reboot), plus this means I have to send it back with my private data still on it, and I can't say I trust Samsung, Google (or anyone really) with my private data. Not to mention some of the stories I've heard/read about Samsung and their policy regarding rooted devices (much less ones with an unlocked bootloader).

In case it helps, here's a few more details:

What state the device is currently in:

It boots up just fine, but nor for long, apps starts to hang and ends up with a cold reboot (sorry if it's not the right jargon, but it starts right from the Google screen).

Everything that doesn't require you to access the filesystem works fine.

Apps doesn't seem to be able to write anything to the filesystem, I tried backing it up with Titanium Backup, much to my surprise the backup files weren't made (although TiBu seems to indicate that they were).

What the device is running:

Variant: Maguro 16GB

ROM: ShinyROM 4.4.2

Kernel: franco.Kernel r395

Baseband: XXLJ1

Bootloader: PRIMED04

Also I don't know if this will affect things but for the record I'm running the latest Ubuntu and Debian.

So this post is pretty much a shot in the dark, since I think I know what I'm dealing with already; if anyone had this problem before in the past, or has it now and somehow managed to fixed it, please do tell. Or if anyone has any experiences RMA-ing your device with a condition like this I'd love to know.