[Verizon Samsung Galaxy Note II] GhostOfTheMachine:
Hey all,

First, I just wanted to say that I have searched high and low for a solution to this already without much success, so I'm coming to you guys in sheer desperation; normally these forums and/or Google turn up the answer pretty quickly, but for once I am thoroughly stumped, so I'm coming to you sages for help.

tl;dr: After failing to unlock the bootloader through Odin (failure at sboot.bin), I re-installed a previously-working stock VRALJB ROM through Odin only to be met with a frozen Samsung boot logo and an inability to enter into recovery mode. I can get the phone into download mode, but that's it. Leaving the phone on for hours has given me no results, just the Samsung logo.

Background

Before I did anything last night that caused this current situation, the phone was running an unlocked/rooted (but otherwise stock) VRALJB ROM since I purchased it second-hand back in 2013. Actually, the bootloader may not have been unlocked as I had assumed, because what started all of this was me deciding it was time for a newer, better-optimized ROM. It was certainly rooted, as I had no issues running and granting root privileges to CWM and flashing the recovery loader. This was something I have done a dozen times for other people's phones (ah, hubris), so when everything appeared to be in order for me to boot into CWM's recovery mode, I did so, but was immediately greeted with Verizon's wonderfully-annoying Yellow Triangle-o-Death. I guess that's what I get for assuming the bootloader was unlocked.

I wasn't too worried; I had already backed up everything prior to attempting this, and I had Odin and my stock ROM ready to go should anything happen. So, I did exactly that: booted into download mode, connected the phone to Odin, and installed the stock VRALJB ROM. After about 6 minutes, the phone restarted and booted into a fresh, new stock version of Jelly Bean. There were no issues with the install, and the phone was working just as it should.

Where the problem started

So, now that I knew that the bootloader had never in fact been unlocked, I began searching down the process needed to unlock it so that I could then install a custom ROM. I began following the steps found on galaxynote2root.com's page for the SCH-I605, including downloading the "GalaxyNote2UnlockVerizon" archive will all the necessary tools (CASUAL, SuckItVerizon, etc).

**NOTE**: I know, now, that there were other, better options that existed and that I should have taken that path instead, but as it had been about a year since I had attempted any kind of flashing on my phone, I was rusty on the most current best-practices for unlocking the bootloader, and just went with the first tutorial I found that matched my phone model/firmware.

I loaded up Odin, included the option to re-partition with the included .pit file, placed the BootloaderBaseline2.tar.md5 file in the Bootloader section, and hit start. Everything was going great until Odin reached the infamous sboot.bin part of the bootloader; it failed at that moment, giving me the usual error message:

<ID:0/004> sboot.bin

<ID:0/004> FAIL!

<OSM> All threads completed. (succeed 0 / failed 1)

"Okay, no biggie," I thought to myself. I must have done something wrong, or maybe the bootloader baseline file was corrupt.

Assuming I had just soft-bricked my phone, I went ahead and reset Odin, loaded up the sch-i605-16gb.pit file, the stock VRALBJ ROM I had just successfully installed 20 minutes earlier, told Odin to erase everything, and hit start.

Odin had no problem re-installing the ROM. It went through the entire process again in about 7 minutes, and I was happy to see the Samsung logo pop up at the end. Only problem was, though, that the Samsung logo stayed there.

"Damn it," I thought. So, I let it sit for a while, thinking that maybe something was happening in the background, but after 10 minutes, the logo was still there. Obviously, something had gone wrong in the install, so I decided I would boot into recovery mode, clear the cache, and to a factory restore now that the ROM was "successfully" installed.

Except I can't get into recovery mode. When I do the usual Volume Up-Home Button-Power Button combo, the Samsung logo appears as it should, but stops right there; it will not enter recovery mode.

Okay, so I can't fix it that way. I'll just go ahead and re-install the ROM through Odin again. After all, I had just used this exact same .md5 ROM file only an hour earlier and the phone booted fully and I had zero issues; so, I knew that the ROM file itself wasn't corrupted.

So I tried re-installing the ROM again through Odin, but got the same result: Samsung logo, with no ability to enter recovery. I tried again and again, and even went and downloaded another copy of the stock VRALBJ ROM in the hopes that maybe something was wrong with the one I was using.

Nope. Same results.

So now my phone is bricked, and I'm at a loss as to how to get it back. I have yet to try newer ROMs, only because I don't want to update to a newer stock version and lose the ability to unlock the bootloader; after all, the entire point behind last night's excursion into madness was so that I could load a custom ROM.

That said, if installing a newer stock ROM from Samsung/Verizon is the only way of fixing this, I will do it, but I was hoping there was another way that may allow me to stay on the VRALBJ ROM as a stepping-stone to another custom ROM.

I appreciate any help I can get, and I apologize for the wall of text, but I know how important background information is when trying to diagnose and fix these kind of problems, so I assumed you guys wouldn't mind :p