[Sprint Galaxy S 5 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] finndo:
OF6 stuck?

So I was on OA6 G900P stock twrp and CF Odin rooted, and thought all was good (just updated from KK) and thought, hey, since I updated because of signal/modem issues, I might as well get the newest one. Odin flashed OF6, reboot, waited 45 minutes, still on boot logo. force reboot, waited 16 more minutes, still on Samsung logo... Figured crap, I got a bad flash...

pulled the battery, got to the stock boot menu, it said I was on baseband OA6, binary custom, system custom. I thought crap, it didn't do anything, no wonder it won't boot. So I went back in to Odin and did it again (while downloading another copy of the tar.md5 from a different source), flash went good, tried to flash CF root in Odin, failed. figured, oh well, I'll just add twrp and flash CF from there... twrp failed. Rebooted to see what I'd get, 30 minutes later, still on Samsung logo...

So I pulled the battery again, got back to the boot menu and over to the Odin screen, now it says binary official, system custom, then a big old message "Firmware upgrade encountered an issue. Please select recovery mode in Kies and try again."

Well, I don't have Kies installed, and the download page at Samsung won't load. from this thread, I take it I cannot downgrade at all, OA6 fails in Odin with fail(Auth). And on My S5 it says:

SW REV CHECK FAIL : [aboot]Fused 3 > Binary 1

Any ideas? I'm hunting an OD3 download from somewhere now. Kinda perturbed, as I researched for 5 hours yesterday to prep for this update from 4.4 (yes I just moved to OA6 this morning), and didn't even find this version until AFTER I had OA6 on my phone today, but nothing about any issues with OD3 or OF6 came up in searches. Now all I care about is getting the f'ing thing to boot.

Sort of a retarded policy to prevent ANY downgrade, what to they expect to do if they roll out a brick update, like has happened to various phones in the past? (fyi, I have been watching the loading bar for 15 minutes trying to "open" the download page for Kies on both samsung.com and samsung-kies.en.softonic.com and both still have a blank page)

***UPDATE - opening the download page in IE worked fine...

***UPDATE 2 - post Kies...

Kies comes back and tells me that my device is not supported by Kies 3. Multiple restarts later (every restart comes immediately to the same screen), I was able to get the Custom OS installation screen to come up, and pressing the volume up key got me back to Odin mode, withOUT the stupid firmware upgrade failed use Kies screen. At this time I have no idea what to try... I am hunting a download of OD3 to try, if not, then I will try OF6 again, plug the phone into the wall and let it sit on the boot logo until tomorrow and see if that works.

***UPDATE 3 - waiting on boot logo

New Download (again), new computer, new cable. Flash failed the first try (OF6), disconnected cable and plugged it back in same port to try again. Second flash attempt passed, now waiting on boot. I did not try to flash anything but the stock firmware this time. As I said, I just want the phone to work. If nothing works this time, I'll take it to a non-reseller Sprint store and see if they'll either update it for me or pass me a refurb.. Battery was full when I flashed it, so I'll wait till the battery dies tonight before giving up. (adb does not find the device while it is loading the boot logo, from previous devices, that tells me it is failing to load the boot loader, but I haven't done this but once in the last 16 months, so maybe I'm wrong). I did notice with flashing OA6 I had a boot sound on first boot after Odin and it took 12 minutes to get to the welcome screen, every flash of OF6 I have not had any sound on boot up.

***UPDATE 4 - amazingly fast battery drain from 90% black boot animation...

Well the battery tanked in about 1hr 15 minutes. I pulled the batter, SIM, and SD, then let it charge 7-12 minutes, reconnected to Odin, flashed the brand new 2.8.7.0 TWRP (in ODIN) and it worked... rebooted to TWRP and let it install root on exit, no idea if it succeeded, I can verify it moved the recovery image so TWRP would not get overwritten during boot though, but the last line (immediately after the "Installing SU..." line was on screen about 250ms before the phone rebooted... I've been watching the boot logo ever since, still no Android OS and still unable to detect the phone in ADB (in TWRP, it showed up without permissions, so I know if it ever boots I'll need to change those settings). Next test is to try a factory reset, if not that, then I'll try to restore the OA6 nandroid I took this morning.

***UPDATE 5 - restored OA6 nandroid

twrp let me in, I restored my OA6 nandroid, boot (took 0 seconds), system, and data only. Immediately on reboot (no prompt to root, good sign as I rooted before the nandroid), I had a startup sound! (noticed later that this only happened once) about 60 seconds later I had a big freaking white box with "System is not responding. Do you want to close it" and wait/ok buttons. I waited about 30-45 seconds as I started editing this post, then hit wait. it disappeared, and I saw cell signal 3/5 bars, and the battery % and charge icon at the top, then the screen went black. about 20 seconds after that I had a Samsung boot animation going at a reduced screen brightness (dark enough that I almost cannot see the animation). I'll pause typing now to wait and see what it does... repeat of the same, except I did not see the notification bar icons this time, and it rebooted after maybe 12 seconds of delay. This time I tapped ok... No difference. During all of this, none of the buttons on the phone appear to have any impact on what is going on. and ADB is not picking up the device during any part of this.

Back to TWRP and full restore of the backup (I took all 7 partitions in the backup), boot took 1 second this time... I've noticed that the CPU temp seems to sky rocket during the boot animation. this last time it went up to 68C, after I let the phone sit charging and finally got back into TWRP it was at 40C. 1 second for EFS restore and 2 seconds for modem. again, 60 seconds and the force close box came up, another 40 seconds and I saw the signal strength and battery% plus charge icon.

Back to TWRP again gave me my old TWRP vKT-2.8.4.2, ADB works again as well, so the restore is definitely overwriting the partitions. I pushed the OD3 de-odexed rom to my SD card and flashed it...

***UPDATE 6 - OD3 de-odexed

Ok, so I already typed this and then lost it... long story short, it upgraded android, then did the same crap, but I got a water droplet sound when clicking wait on the System is not responding, saw LTE data for a bit, then it rebooted any way, same crap. Going to reflash OF6 in ODIN and see if I can get anywhere with that, then try some roms... need to let the battery charge up a bit first though. Laterz, if there is another update, it will be a resolution, if not...