[Galaxy S III Mini Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] darkoms:
Hi hello howdy!

I'm going to skip the foreplay cose the action here is pretty weird and you'll want to get right in, trust me.

I've a Galaxy S3 Mini GT-8190L, that reboots itself, after it has booted up, and I entered the sim pin and lock pattern I've from seconds to 5 min of grace before the phone restarts itself. I have tried two different batteries and the problem persists. I went and decided to rule out hardware problems (power bttn) and after some tinkering, ruled that out too. So now my best guess is firmware.

The phone is not rooted, does not have recovery mode installed, and is running stock 4.1.2 jelly bean with TouchWiz, no mods, no hack-y stuff, your old regular samsung s3 mini.

I tried installing CM11 with odin, and didn't work. But not because odin threw an error, no, that went on perfectly according to the program. But when the phone booted up, the rom was still stock, nothing changed, and it rebooted itself briefly. Weird. So then I thought "well, maybe at least the recovery mode is there now" since it supposedly was a package install. But no, when I tried to boot onto recovery the phone gets stucked on the boot screen with the samsung brand and model of the phone, and then restarts itself, this happens like four times and then the phone boots normally, the OS starts, everything loads and then goes on to restarting. So this was not a solution either.

Next I though, well lets just install the recovery, no, that didn't work, odin said that the install was successful but it was not. Tried with odin 3.04, .07 and .09, tried CW and TWR, neither of them load, as before, when trying to boot to recovery the phone displays the splash and the reboots itself like four times before starting up the OS.

Next I though well, lets try to root this thing, at this point I was just trying anything to see if anything sticked, but nothing, tried SuperOneClick, and no. Wanted to try TowelRoot but that uses an apk. I tried vRoot against my best judgement, but that didn't work, but not because of the reasons you might think, it did install, the phone managed to stay on for enough time for it to get running, but when it restarted, there was no app there, it was as if nothing was installed just a few second ago. I thought "huhh? That's really weird". So I went and did some testing on this matter.

It turns out that no matter what I do, I can install an app, delete 5 apps, change settings, and nothing sticks, when the phone restarts it goes back to the way it was, its like the phone lost the short memory and its like that Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore's movie, 50 First Dates. The phone rollsback to the state it was when everything began.

I even tried to change something quick, and restart myself the phone to see if that would make the change stick, but no, that didn't work either.

So, I came up with a brilliant idea, look up a similar case on internet, 'cose you know, it has to have happened to someone else before me. But this is so weird that looking it up is a challenge by itself. I tried a few things here and there but nothing does it. So now I'm here writing my sci-fi story looking for some feedback on how can this story be ended without killing any of the characters, I want everyone to survive and work again. You know, happy endings.

Any ideas on what can be the problem? Seen anything like this before?