[Galaxy Grand Prime Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] expat42451:
Little over a month ago (I am traveling currently in Quito Ecuador) I had my fanny pack with my Galaxy Note 2 (rooted, custom ROM) and my LG V400 tablet (rooted, deoxed, debloated and running ART rather than dalvic) stolen. Bought as a replacement a Galaxy Note 8 and an SM G530H. Had to have a phone and didn't do any research on the 530 H. BIG mistake.

Rooted the 530H installed the CWM recovery hack and started doing various things I do to an Android device I use daily. First BIG disappointment was in the dev community. No custom ROM's. Anywhere. Fine. In process of all of this I encrypted the phone- who would carry an unencrypted phone anyway, you are begging to be pwned if it goes bye bye. In process of all of this discovered that the CWM hack for the 530H won't deal with the /data partition when the phone is encrypted. That sucks hugely. Today we got news of the second fairly critical Android vulnerability revealed in the last three days (huh? really?) so I figured fine since this second one is with remote management crap code that is not secure (the first one with an SMS vulnerability) and potentially a MUCH more critical problem; since I have locked down as much as possible SMS with a stock rooted ROM...and since to hack remote management to try to kill this vuln-- (you can download the checkpoint scanner from playstore, I strongly recommend doing it and scanning your phone)-its going to take some pretty good surgery with Root Browser and I might break the OS. I figured it might be wise to do a full backup. Scanned the phone with the checkpoint scanner and sure enough its vulnerable. The internet and cell-landia in South America is like the wild west so it probably would be a wise idea to try to fix remote management vulnerability as much as possible. I already know the CWM hack WONT deal with encryption. TWRP on the Note 8 will. It asks for the password when entering recovery and does full painless backups and restores(My Note 8 isn't vulnerable because I am running a custom ROM on it without all the BS code).

So I come over here and find no prob a couple of TWRP threads for the G530. ITs a hack which is OK BUT 1) a number of the links are click bait sites (mods thanks for deleting one and the second in that thread that points to the nz site is click bait AND doesn't work) but finally found a link. Downloaded and flashed. Starts in recovery just fine except that 1) it will NOT mount the external SD card and 2) it reports the /data partition as 0 b. Meaning (like CWM) it can't deal with an encrypted partition. So what good is it?

Its a shame because for a mid priced phone the 530H really is a pretty capable hw platform, quick and stable, not bad for the $$. The follow on in the dev community is sad-. No ROMS. No recoveries using the phone encrypted. Were I not traveling I would try to port CM 12.1 to run on the 530 platform ( I wrote my first code in 1968 when I was 17) but I am not going to attempt it on a laptop and with other things I am involved in at this point no way.

So if you are thinking about the Grand Prime if you can be satisfied with a stock ROM, unencrypted, and don't mind getting your hands dirty then its not bad. However there are a lot better platforms out there as far as after market dev participants custom ROM's and simple things like recoveries that work as advertised. Be advised. Sorry I bought it. That would change in a big way if there was a stable ROM that got rid of all the s*it code that is in stock Android AND at LEAST a recovery that did what it was supposed to do. Lots of people here try to help posting links but before doing so understand please how the original program (TWRP) actually works on other platforms with all the bells and whistles and try to verify that the hack you link to actually performs like the original.