[Verizon Galaxy Note 3 General] pikes:
I thought you guys might find this amusing, and hopefully it will help some people that get into a similar situation as myself. First, a little background - I rooted and installed Alliance Rom years ago back before the bootloader was unlocked. This worked amazing for me for a long time but I've recently had some weird issues with my phone so I decided to do a factory reset.

I went into settings, clicked factory reset, and then my phone got into a boot loop on recovery. I remember from before I had to do a regular boot then click recovery at the prompt instead of doing the factory recovery so I did that.

Instead of doing a normal wipe, I wanted to wipe everything on my phone and start from scratch so I did the full wipe (in what I think was TWRP or safestrap or whatever). When I went to reboot my phone it had a message like "are you sure? there's no OS installed" and I clicked ok. Well now I couldn't get the phone to boot into anything except download mode so at least I can use Odin.

I'm frantically searching google to try and find ways to install some sort of recovery so I could load AllianceRom again since I still had the zip file for it. Eureka, I found TWRP for my phone! I tried to flash TWRP through Odin but that doesn't work because my bootloader wasn't unlocked.... I remember this from last time :( ... all of the places I found online to install any sort of recovery required the phone to be booted into android.

So I'm clicking around and someone has a recovery randomly posted in a thread so I install it thinking, what the hell, what's the worst that could go wrong. So I install it through Odin and boot into normal recovery and I get this message saying my phone has been tampered with and to go to a verizon store immediately! Oops... upon further investigation (looking at the download screen), I tripped the knox flag... oh well, it's not like my phone is in warranty anymore (I got it on release day).

I search around looking for what I should do next and I found a thread that talked about being on complete stock, rooting, then unlocking the bootloader. I download all the files I need (newest firmware here - https://www.sammobile.com/firmwares/galaxy-note3/SM-N900V/ and thread here - https://xdaforums.com/verizon-galaxy-note-3/general/guide-ob6-of1-root-bootloader-unlock-t3439010) to go back to stock and flash in Odin. Actually I didn't download from sammobile.com because it was downloading too slow so I just googled the file name and found it somewhere else faster, go figure.

Everything seems to be going ok then all of a sudden FAIL in Odin... Ahhh what the heck do I do now? Try again obviously! Second try works woo hoo! Phone start booting up, things are looking good!!! hooray!! But wait... it's taking forever to start and it's stuck on the Verizon logo... uh oh... taking way too long to boot up so I pull the battery and try again. Boots right in saying that android is upgrading so I think I'm finally in the home stretch here.

I try to run the ArabicToolApp for Root but I installed the latest firmware which isn't supported :( DAMN IT! Downloaded the correct firmware (OB6!), flashed in Odin, same problem before where it was stuck on the red verizon screen, pulled battery, rebooted, finally time to get root!

Phone finally boots into OS and I get a popup "unfortunatley com.google.process.gapps has stopped" great... and it keeps coming up over and over again after I hit ok... just my luck! Reboot again to see if that fixes the issue. Seems weird that I didn't have to go through all the initial setup stuff I did on the other version I installed... hmm... or maybe it was because I pulled the battery on the red verizon screen? Whatever. I somehow manage to get to options to do a factory reset and I let the verizon screen stay on a while this time. I'll go take my contacts out and give my wife some love while I wait ;)

Come back and the phone is at the setup wizard, this is good news. Enabled USB debugging, installed root, done! Thank god!

Next I want to unlock the bootloader. I follow the steps here which aren't very clear (I'm guessing on purpose for novice computer users) - https://xdaforums.com/verizon-galaxy-note-3/general/official-note-3-verizon-bootloader-t3359370

1. I installed eMMC from the play store to make sure my CID started with a 15, it does so I know I'm good to use the hack.

2. I installed both files in the unlock kit (adb and driver setup)

3. Fired up adb, navigated to where I had unlock_n3, and ran through the first part of the code once, reboot my phone, checked that the CID was the developer CID, and then ran the second part of the code three times before it worked

I verified the bootloader was installed correctly by trying to install TWRP through Odin, which worked!

I'm going to try out Jasmine Rom since it's a popular one that is on 5.0. My SD card only showed 30 megs free or something like that, so I formatted it from within android and copied the zip file over and installed the Rom through TWRP. Rom installed just fine, so I did one last factory reset which worked great and I think I'm finally good to go!

If you have any questions or run into any issues feel free to reply here and I'll try to help as much as I can.