[Verizon Galaxy S 5 General] Voltron8Myhat:
possible updates to First Post plus hangs on black Samsung screen and won't connect

I'm using the "working root method" (OK3_root) to root my OK3 Verizon build S5. Thanks SO MUCH for all the work, jrkruse. I noticed a few things that you might want to add to the "How To" post to clear a few things up for the less experienced.

Once I soft-bricked my device the first time, I went to the "prepare your phone" instructions to start from scratch. On your "prepare phone" instructions, you are clear about not making any changes (adding accounts, etc.) once you install the Verizon Home Tar, but you may want to add a reminder to re-activate Developer Mode and check de-bugging (the OK3 root.bat won't run if this isn't done).

Next, the third line of the OK3 root.bat, where you need to install the NK2 kernel states: "The Phone and Get Stuck on the Samsung Screen." [sic] I'm not sure what this means, but this is where I ran into problems. I have the latest drivers installed, but the phone soft-bricked after installing the NK2 kernel with Odin. The instructions here also state: "If the phone never reconnects then you may have a driver problem. Please be patient." But I'm not sure what "be patient" means. Keep waiting? If it's a driver problem waiting won't do anything, right? Maybe switch those two lines or say "it may take a while to reboot, please be patient" before mentioning the potential driver issue?

In the end, I always get to the "KRSLOG: ROOT DONE!" dialogue in the CMD window, but then the phone hangs on the Samsung Galaxy S5 (black) window and is never able to reboot (even after battery pull, etc.). The root instructions say try loading KROOT manually, but I'm not sure how to do this if the phone hangs on the Samsung Galaxy S5 black screen and is not recognized by the computer.

When plugging the phone in, the computer recognizes that it's plugged in (even though there is no drive letter assigned nor does the device come up in Explorer, in the Device manager Samsung Android ADB Interface appears and Samsung File-Stor USB Device shows up under DVD/CD Rom Drives). I tried disabling the Samsung File-Stor USB Device thinking maybe this was the Verizon Auto Install disk (vs. what happens when the phone actually connects as a media device), but it didn't seem to help (yes, I re-enabled it when that didn't help).

So... like so many others, I seem to be stuck at the black Samsung screen even after the root.bat process tells me that the phone has been rooted. Thus, I can't reboot the S5 and I can't get it to show up on the computer to complete the root2.bat. If I try booting to the bootloader, the device is also not recognized by the computer (thus, root2.bat just waits at the "waiting for the phone to be reconnect [sic] ..." dialog).

Finally (don't know if this is relevant or helps), in the CMD window after using Odin to install the NK2 kernel, when root.bat is continuing the root but before I get the "KRSLOG: ROOT DONE!", I see "set permissive for s_nit_shell type s_init_shell does not exist", "set permissive for toolbox type toolbox does not exist", and "set permissive for toolbox_exec type toolbox_exec does not exist". Again, don't know if this is part of the problem, but thought it might be worth mentioning.

Thanks again for all your work to help us get our S5's rooted!

EDIT (update): I'm rooted and running. The thing that isn't clear is that when the phone "hangs" on the black Samsung screen after you get confirmation of root, you need to reboot into bootloader, open Odin, and install (tick the AP box and select) the VZW_BOK3_KERNEL_ONLY.tar.md5. Once you do that, the phone should reboot into the system without issue. Again, the wording isn't clear in the text that appear in the bat file, so this was the problem for me (didn't realize I needed to open Odin and install this file). Once you do that, you should be golden.