[Galaxy S 5 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] gloria13:
"sbl1 partition doesn't exist" on Galaxy S5 (SM-G900F) hardware or software failure?

Hi,

I'd appreciate your help on the following problem with a Galaxy S5 (SM-G900F). I bought this phone recently (rather cheap) from some seller of overstock items with the intention of flashing Lineage 15.1 on it and using it as my main phone.

Even before any changes to the system, the phone went off after a couple of minutes, and instead of a reboot, it displayed the following text in the top left corner (without showing the usual "Samsung Galaxy S5 - powered by android" boot splash):

BOOT RECOVERY MODE
CHECK BOOT PARTITIONS
sbl1 partition doesn't exist
ODIN MODE
PRODUCT NAME: SM-G900F
Current binary: Samsung Official
System Status: Custom
REACTIVATION LOCK (KK): OFF
KNOX WARRANTY VOID: 0x0
QUALCOMM SECUREBOOT: ENABLE (CSB)
RP SWREF: S1, T1, R1, A1, P1
SECURE DOWNLOAD: ENABLE
UDC Start

Pressing the power button for 5sec then rebooted the phone as usual, and the existing Android (some 5.x??) worked okay. I think this happened twice within an hour.

Well, I thought this was a software issue and as I wanted to reflash the S5 anyway, I didn't care and went straight to installing Lineage 15.1 (20180709 nightly). I did it as follows.

1. Boot into download mode (Home+Power+Volume Down)

2. Use heimdall v1.4.2 (on my Linux PC, compiled from source) to upload TWRP 3.2.2 to the phone

3. Reboot into recovery (Home+Power+Volume Up) and use TWRP to wipe dalvik cache, cache, system, and data partitions

4. Use adb push on my PC in order to copy the Lineage and the addon-su zip files to /sdcard/

5. In TWRP, install the two zip files, then reboot the phone

The phone went up with Lineage 15.1 as intended, but there are still two major errors:

A) After a couple of minutes, the phone spontaneously reboots.

B) Sometimes it reboots into lineage, but sometime it hangs in "BOOT RECOVERY MODE" with a message similar to the one above. Not surprisingly, these two lines have changed:

CURRENT BINARY: Custom
...
KNOX WARRANTY VOID: 0x1 (0)

Now I need to find out whether this is a hardware failure or a software problem.

When you google "sbl1 partition deosn't exist", you do find a number of similar error reports for different versions of the Galaxy S5. Usually, someone recommends to flash "a better ROM" to the device, but I never saw any confirmation that this solved the problem. If it did, I'd be interested to know *which* ROM solved the problem. From my experience, I doubt it is as easy as that.

Can anyone recommend a specific build of Lineage 14.1, 15.0 or 15.1 that is know to be rock solid on the SM-G900F so that I can rule out that the involuntary reboots are a lineage problem?

I know Linux quite well (on x86 and amd64). What is the partition "sbl1" and on which device is it located? Is it on the internal 16GB flash? I am worried that failing to find that partition sometimes, but not always points to a hardware error when reading from the internal flash. How do I find out whether that's the case?

Although the box I received was still sealed (you can fix that, can't you?), I don't want to rule out that the seller had already flashed or at least updated the S5 after all these years of collecting dust on the shelf. Is there any chance that they messed it up and left a corrupt partition table or corrupt main boot loader? How can I tell and how can I fix that?

Thanks a lot for your help,

Gloria13