[Verizon Galaxy Note 3 General] brutalnet:
Success, and then some!

Praise Kek, and Shadilay! :)

Come, fellow techies. Hear the tale of my night and morning.

I need to preface this by saying THANK YOU to everyone whose posts and comments I read on this thread tonight. There are many of you.

I do, however, need to warn you... this post is gonna be a LONG ONE.

I came here just to share my experiences with this, and subsequent things I did to my phone after unlocking the bootloader last night, and this morning. I started at 7:30 PM - it's now 3:15 AM and I'm still at it. I'm over the major hurdles. At this moment, I'm customizing the OS, and using Titanium to bring back my apps and their settings. This may be too much info, but it is what it is. Maybe some of the stuff I did didn't follow instructions to a T - call it a margin of error more than anything. Hopefully I detail the steps as accurately as possible, as well.

I started off with stock-but-rooted 4.4.2 (NC4) on my phone. I backed up all my apps in Titanium, and then I used the ADB method to unlock the bootloader. It was being a bit tricky. I had to run it a total of three times before it took. It was probably due to error on my end. Knowing there was going to be some weird SD stuff going on in the process, I threw the spare 32GB MicroSD I had at the house in, for the process. The bootloader unlock did to the SD card what I've seen described by a few here. It made a ton of tiny, seemingly random unusable partitions on the card. I had to use a partition manager in Windows (I use EaseUS) to get that straightened away. Not a big deal in the grand scheme. Who cares! The bootloader's unlocked! After three years and a month of having my phone!

I then went on to install TWRP Recovery 2.8.7 using ODIN. Success.

After doing so, knowing the bootloader was able to be unlocked on my phone (starts with 15 btw), I used TWRP to flash cm-13-20151101-UNOFFICIAL-hlte.zip. I'm not sure I ever saw anywhere that it'd work. When it booted, it clearly wasn't the right firmware for the phone, as the IMEI was blank, causing the SIM not to be seen. Also, although the firmware took, and it booted, in "About Phone", I saw the baseband version was still NC4. I then tried to update both the modem, and the kernel from ODIN, hoping it somehow may have remedied the IMEI/SIM situation. They both took, without errors, but when I rebooted, nothing had changed. The baseband was still NC4, the IMEI was blank, and the SIM wasn't being recognized.

Weird. Oh well.

After the usual pre-firmware flash "wipe prep" on the phone, I decided to ODIN the TAR of stock N900VVRUEOB6 onto the phone. I looked for OF1 everywhere and couldn't find it, strangely enough. OB6 took just fine. TWRP went back on nicely, as well (I think I reinstalled it at this point...?) Still, though, the baseband was NC4. It only seemed to have a scant few seemingly-bearable quirky issues, though. Of the issues, most notably and annoyingly, it would not reconnect to my home network after a restart of the phone. It didn't seem to retain the password, either. I figured I'd put a tack in that and deal with it later. Not a huge deal provided I could get it taken care of on the back end.

It rooted just fine with ArabicToolApp. I then installed Titanium, and one by one restored my apps and their settings to the phone, skipping over Xposed and Wanam Xposed, and a few other things I thought best to install fresh. I restored the better part of 25 essential apps, and everything was fine, sparing the wifi annoyance.

You know where I'm headed, next, I bet...

I went to install Xposed only to discover that, well, as you may be aware, Xposed doesn't work natively with stock, non-deodexed 5.0 firmware, period. At this point I winced and dropped a couple F bombs. I had no idea about the compatibility issue, and just assumed it'd work. No big deal, right?

I only use Xposed for about **50 different things** ::shakes fists at the sky::

The essential circle battery, the high volume warning disable, default gallery fix, OS customizations, wifi hotspot, YouTube background player, disable full battery alert... Thinking about each thing I'd be lacking increased the WTF (wicked tense factor, I'm from Rhode Island). This was a no-go. There's no getting used to that or just "dealing with it". From what I could see, there were exactly zero alternative apps that were compatible with the Xposed modules I've come to rely on.

So then I started to look into if it was possible to deodex firmware "in place". I found a few "solutions". I use the quotes because they were total abortions. One method involved pulling an F-load of system files from the device onto the PC, and then running an application on them to deodex them, apparently. I was going to do it, despite it being a gigantic CF, but I then ran into a few MORE challenges. One method to get the files from the phone onto the PC involved using "pull" commands in ADB. ADB worked great earlier in the night to unlock the bootloader. Well, yeah, no... when I tried to use the "pull" command in the ADB shell, I was told it couldn't find my device. Dude, it's right here, it's plugged in, nothing changed. Look. Right here. IT'S PLUGGED IN.

Gotta get the files from my phone onto the PC. Gotta do it... HEY WAIT!!! I have an IDEA! I use SambaDroid which is a very very cool application. For those unaware, it allows you to access your phone through Windows, as if it was a shared drive. Start->Run->\\192.168.0.118 [ENTER] and like 10 seconds later.... bink... up comes the directory structure of whatever you've chosen to share in the app, right there in Windows. We're getting there!

I'll share the root of the phone, then I'll go into the system folder of the phone and copy everything I need from there... into a folder on my laptop... so I can begin to process them as I'm reading about in one of literally 30 tabs I had open in Chrome researching and dealing with this all.

I read over the instructions about which files I needed again. I made a folder on my desktop for them, highlighted them on the phone side, and dragged them into the new folder I just made. Here we go. Problem solved. Yeah. 6 hours remaining. SambaDroid, I had forgotten, maxes out at 1MB a second, and you don't see that maximum very often. It's more in the 500K range. The solution was not a solution. More expletives. Ten more looks at the clock in my room, exhaling, knowing I had accomplished just forward of nothing.

I then found a tutorial for an app called 3C-Toolbox, which I saw had a built-in deodex function right in the app!!! Score! Oh man, I could have saved so much time. So I went to Play Store, I installed it, launched it, went to where the deodex function was supposed to be, and...

...it wasn't there. Mas Expletivos. What even... You gotta be kidding me. As luck had it, I had installed a later version than what it showed. I then uninstalled the one I got from Play Store, and hunted through the "bad side of town" APK download pages, dodging malware-a-plenty in large part thanks to uBlock for Chrome (love ya honey). After a tedious bunch of "link shorteners to nowhere", I finally came across the version I needed. Got it. Samba'ed it to my phone. Installed it. Launched it. Went to where the function was... still not there. Are you f...

This quest to deodex-in-place the installed ROM had concluded, for me. I'd reached my end. I gave it several college tries. As this installation was not something that was going to cut it, it looked like I was, once again, at square one. EXPLETIVE!!!!

Deep into the morning, at this point, I needed a solution, and the sooner the better. I had seen mention of JasmineROM here on this thread, but wasn't quite wrapping my head around what it actually was. Was it some big patch package for an already-installed ROM? Was it full firmware on its own? I saw hints towards both. Mentally frazzled, I tried to wrap my head around it. After a lot of digging, but still not learning much... I was starting to think, I was starting to hope... the version I was looking into (5.1.1) was standalone deodexed 5.0 firmware with Xposed already installed. Sounds like what I need. I think. I hope.

Welp... I found, and grabbed it, in ZIP format. It was well over 1 GB, so I figured it was complete firmware. Having a Verizon "retail" phone which was now essentially a Developer Edition, thanks to the unlocked bootloader, I was confused about which steps to take. The ones for the retail phone, or the developer edition? I also grabbed the modem, kernel, and "partial firmware" files. I put the Jasmine ZIP onto the card, flashed it, then, per the instructions, ODINed the modem and a "lean" kernel. I rebooted, and after the ominous wait... up it came. Success! I hope. I looked and saw that this time it updated the baseband version to where it was supposed to be. It was running rather snappy, and a lot of the expected bloatware was wonderfully absent. Also, that annoying wifi quirk was nowhere to be found. Things are looking up!

One by one, carefully, I restored my apps, rebooted, and it went into a boot loop at the Samsung animation. I let it be for ten minutes. I pulled the battery, put it back in, went into recovery, wiped the caches, and no change.

5:15 AM - Here we go again. I booted into TWRP and repeated the process of installing Jasmine over again. I'm restoring apps a few at a time now...

6:20 AM - It looks like I'm done, and everything's working. Time to do a BACKUP.

If you made it to this point, you must be really bored, or a total gotta-know-it-all techie. Or both.