[Verizon Samsung Galaxy S 4] Ganuke2kx:
Thanks once again for the latest replies Stang5Litre and ATGkompressor...... much appreciated.

So as of right now I am pleased to say that I am writing from my S4 that is running Stang5litre Rom !

From the point last evening of being stuck at the black Samsung logo screen what I did was :

* Odin on my S4 a full wipe NC5 tar ( that I had saved on my laptop. That put all at the NC5 version

* I then used towelroot ( which I also had saved on my computer from last year ) to gain root back on my S4

* I then installed flashfire and SuperSU back onto my S4.

* Next I used flashfire to flash onto my S4 an OC1 Rom ( yep.... also saved on my laptop from last year ) that put everything at the OC1 version........ except the bootloader which got to a NK4 version.

This was all I did last year at the point where I first tried getting Stang5litre Rom on my S4 the other night.

Then I tried again using flashfire to get Stang5litre Rom on my S4. This time there were 3 things done differently :

1) I placed the necessary files to be flashed on the internal storage space. ( The 1st time they were on my external SD card. )

2) I had flashfire updated to the latest 2.9 version. ( The 1st time I was using flashfire 2.4 . )

3) And prior to this latest attempt I had been doing some extra researching on xda and read of some people recommending to keep pressing the volume down button through the entire process of using flashfire until ones smartphone fully boots up. So I did that as well.

When it appeared to all flash and then got to my new S4 " Stang5litre " boot animation...... Woot !

So now going to spend some time checking my S4 over...... as I see some new apps / features that were not part of my S4 before. I want to find out what they are about and how they function.

A question for Stang5litre...... do we need to permanently keep SuperSU at the ' always grant ' state ? ( I use to keep it at " prompt " so a message would appear and I would know when something was trying to get root access...... just in case something I didn't want having root access was not going to get it without my knowledge. Paranoid I guess I am. lol )

Probably on Monday I will search on xda for an xposed that I can use on my S4...... as my next step.

Also...... and sorry that this is not really on topic for this thread...... but I am wondering if anyone knows of a good backup option for our Verizon S4 ? A few years back I had a phone with twrp recovery on it...... by where a full backup ( nandroid ) could be restored. I know that is not an option for this phone. I do see in flashfire a backup section. From that I guess I would do a Full backup.

But I am thinking while that may work to restore a backup on a mostly working phone...... my concern is if my phone we're to again get to where it won't fully boot up...... or goes into a bootloop. Seems restoring from the flashfire app in such a scenario would be impossible.

Is there a backup option in flashfire to create a tar format of a Full backup ? So then I could use that tar file in Odin to restore my S4 back to the state it is in right now...... and avoid having to do this whole process over again. Just in case something goes majorly wrong in the future and my S4 won't fully load up or goes into a boot loop. ( like if I install xposed incorrectly or use a module wrongly. )

Thanks in advance for any additional advice on this provided.