[Galaxy S I9000 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] PMrjn83:
Hello,

I figure someone here might be able to help since most of where I found information regarding my issue came from this subforum. My phone is i897 (Captivate), but I think it should be similar; I posted there as well but no luck :(.

I normally can get by pretty well, and I have done numerous searches before posting for help. This time I have really run into a brick wall, and I really need help here.

Basically, I did something really stupid where I did not know that the phone had been booting off a external SD (my mom gave it back to me like that). Actually, I suspected that it did because the phone would have not booted without the card, however, I could flash my phone even if I removed the external SD card (as if the internal SD were there, but it wasn't), but it had always required me to insert the card back in for it to reboot from a flash. So I thought maybe internal SD was fine.

Originally, I had a Samsung 8gb class 6, but I wanted to change it to a 32gb class 10 ( to help the OS run smoother IF it were running on external SD). This is where I made a great mistake; I formatted the 32gb card and made 3 partitions. The first one is in FAT32 of 24 gb, 2nd is in EXT4 4gb, 3rd is the rest in EXT 4 as well. The original setup that was working had about 5.5gb in FAT32 and about 1.88gb of EXT(not sure which). The mistake was that I also formatted the 8gb card as well. In chronological order, these were what has happened:

1. I did a Odin stock reset to 2.3.5 with CWM injected

2. Installed Corn Kernel

3. Formatted both external SDs and repartition as mentioned above

4. At this point, I didn't know there was an issue. CWM sees the external SD and I tried to install CM 10.3 since I read in one of the threads that JB has a weird file systems and it needed to be installed twice to fix sdcard0 and sdcard1

5. CM10.3 installed kernel, and failed afterward since there was no /system and /data. At this point, I have Neat Kernel installed and lost bootloader along with fastboot and cannot access download mode.

6. I have tried to change EXT4 to EXT3 or EXT2 to see if there would be any luck in file system recognition, but no luck

7. The only way I can connect to the phone was through ADB, and verified that my internal SD card was dead because mmcblk0 was not there when I removed external SD

8. I tried to mount mmcblk0p1 (4gb EXT4 partition) and mmcblk0p2 as /system and /data, but I had been getting an error

9. I tried to use USB mount in TWRP, but no additional drive showed up (confirmed dead internal SD)

9. I tried to look for vold.fstabs but /system does not exist. The only *.fstabs file founds were in /etc file (not /system/etc) and is, for example, aries.fstabs

I know for the fact that it can be done because the phone was working before, but I really don't have enough linux knowledge or the what the phone looks at in chronological order in order to figure out how to remedy this. I would really appreciate if someone can guide me to a right direction. Thank you.

Below are major references I have gone through (not including youtube videos, etc..):

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=2057004

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1897918

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=2057004

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=2199215

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?p=30415128#post30415128

http://xdaforums.com/showpost.php?p=31017954&postcount=5335

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=911228

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1463756

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1241574

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=845708&page=2