[Verizon Samsung Galaxy Note II] The:Dude:
Hi everybody.. I've been viewing and reading the XDA forums for years, looking for help and tips with various phones.. I just registered today so I could share my recent experience with rooting the Note II (sch-i605 from Verizon) that I bought used.

I was doing my due diligence, researching different methods of rooting, several different websites, which I've concluded are a waste of time because they all link back to the best! Trying to decide if it was worth it with the locked bootloader.. After reading up on several different threads, I figured what the heck.. So I bit the bullet and dove in.. No easy task this, because I don't have internet access at home, other than on my wife's phone with unlimited data.. Downloading the files necessary, saferoot, safestrap, twrp, various versions of drivers, some programs.. All very time consuming over 4g! Lol..

Anyway, having rooted a Motorola Droid Razr, a Samsung Epic 4g, OG Droid, an LG G2, along others in the past, I'm not an expert, but not exactly a n00b at rooting either.. I Odin on my PC from when I did the Epic, and adb was there from multiple devices, so that saved a little time.. So over to the PC I go with my Note 2, wife's G2 and my trusty USB cable..

Saferoot worked beautifully! First time success! Installed jrummy root check to verify.. :good:

I let that be it for while since the bootloader is perma-locked.. But after a couple hours of reading more threads about ROMs, I started feeling the itch again.. So off to download twrp so I can play with some shiny new ROMs.. The twrp website has installation instructions for twrp manager from the play store, upgrading from inside an earlier version, fresh install with Odin, and using "su dd if=/sdcard/twrp.img of=/dev/block/mmcblk0p9".. Since I was on the other side of the room, I decided to try the dd method.. Not having experience with this particular command, I figured some practice was in order.. Read up on what it does, played around with it using some worthless files.. Then I used it in reverse.. Finally I ran the did command for real.. That's when it all went downhill.. When I rebooted I ended up with the Dreaded Yellow Triangle of Doom! Unauthorized software and take the phone to Verizon.. Ask I had was download mode.. :crying:

Fought with the phone and the computer for a while until my wife made me give it up for the night. Studied up some more on the , and jumped right into things first thing this morning.. Downloaded a couple .IMG stock room files, one rooted one not, and a stock recovery .IMG to use with Odin.. Got them into the PC, Windows 7 Pro, hooked up the new brick and fired up Odin.. No joy.. Odin wouldn't see my phone! Time for a smoke break, just had to step back and think about things for a minute or two. After a Google search and some digging, i found a YouTube video describing exactly my problem(Odin or Kies won't recognise download mode). I tried it, and guess what, IT FREAKING WORKED! I don't understand it, but taking the battery out made Odin see my phone!

Now onward we go..Back to trusty old XDA! That's when I found the Android toolkit bySkipSoft.. Talk about a phone saver! Got my phone hooked up, in download mode, tried a few different things in the Unified Android Toolkit, couldn't download anything since the PC has no internet but I already had stock recovery and stock rom images, and the toolkit told me where to stick em! First I tried to use a few adb commands to try to get the data off the phone I wanted to save, but I finally gave up because adb couldn't see the phone since it couldn't see that USB debugging was active, even though I promised it was..

Before I tried flashing the stock rom I thought I'd flash the recovery since that was the beginning of the problem. About 4 mouse clicks, 30 seconds, and a reboot, my phone was alive again! :victory:

Still on the stock mj9 release, rooted with saferoot, and chugging along splendidly.. I may just let it sit this way for a while.. Lol!

TLDR: got a used Note 2, rooted it, b0rked it, and fixed it with the help of the awesome devs and members of XDA!

Unfortunately, I didn't keep track of all the threads, devs, and members I looked at and read that helped me solve my conundrum.. However, the main reason I finally registered was so that I could say a great big

THANK YOU

to the community here.. It's the best! And you came through for me in my hour of need..

The:Dude

P.s. as I have time over the next few days I'm going to try to find the posts I used for information, and add my thanks there too.. Also will try to post links, but they'll probably be in text not actual links lol..