[Galaxy S 5 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] AHershler:
Hi experts,

I would very much appreciate some help regarding the following:

I have a Samsung Galaxy S5 SM-G900F with factory installed stock rom G900FXXU1BPA2 (Android 5.0). I used the SkipSoft Unified Android Toolkit 1.4.5 to root the phone and install TWRP recovery (2.7.1.0-klte as recommended by Unified Android Toolkit). I made a first Nandroid Backup and was able to successfully restore this backup (I restored boot, system and data to verify that Nandroid restore works). I then used Titanium Backup to restore my apps from another phone, and all was well.

A week or so later I wanted to modify something I wasn't sure I wanted to keep (using apktool). I therefore made a second Nandroid backup and then proceeded to make modifications to the phone. After I saw the result, I didn't like it, and therefore restored the second Nandroid backup. After rebooting, the phone gave a flurry of forced stops ("Unfortunately XXX has stopped"). It is not a bootloop but I can't do anything meaningful with the phone other than restart it.

To try and resolve this, I used TWRP to wipe cache and dalvik cache and rebooted. The phone went through the lengthy "Android is upgrading" process but the result was the same: all my apps force stop.

I then decided to try and restore the original first Nandroid backup (which I had been able to restore successfully earlier), and this resulted in the same issue. Since I have several backups of this first backup I was able to verify that the files were good. Also did MD5 checksum verification in TWRP and it all checked out.

Using Odin, I was able to restore a stock ROM from SamMobile (G900FXXU1BOL1_G900FOJK1BOL1_ILO) and after restart, the phone works as usual, but of course all my apps and data were gone.

I was then able to use TWRP to restore only boot and system from the second backup, so I would be back on the exact same ROM that my phone came with, and this worked just fine; the phone started as if factory restored.

I then used TWRP to restore only data, and this resulted again in the same problem: all apps force close. Note that this is a restore of data only to the same phone running the exact same ROM that the Nandroid backup was made on, and it still did not work.

I have been thinking about this issue and searching through the various forums but I did not find anyone having this same exact issue. Here are some questions I came up with:

1. Is TWRP 2.7.1.0 completely compatible with this phone and with Android 5.0? Would it help if I installed a newer version of TWRP? Would I be able to restore Nandroid backups made with TWRP 2.7.1.0 with TWRP 3.X?

2. Assuming my second Nandroid backup is not corrupt, is there a better (less intrusive) restore I can do of the apps? Can Titanium Backup read TWRP 2.7.1.0 backups and restore them, including SMS?

3. What could be the reason for TWRP 2.7.1.0 restore not to be working properly? I did activate the fingerprint reader after the first Nandroid Backup, but if that is the issue I would have expected that first backup (in which fingerprints were not yet enabled) to restore properly and it doesn't.

Would appreciate any help!

Thanks,

AH