[Galaxy S 5 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] MarylinC:
Please can someone help me with a problem I’m having with my Samsung Galaxy s5.

I put my phone on charge before I went to bed and when I woke up it was still showing a red LED. I knew this was wrong because it should have had enough time to charge and turn green. I had not powered the phone off before putting it on charge and I plugged it into the same USB 3.0 charging lead I have been using for the past six months. I unplugged the phone and pressed the power button to light up the lock screen but it didn’t light up.

I’m thinking possibly something has either shorted or over heated and fried something either on the charging port assembly or one of the chips adjacent to the port while the charger was plugged in. It seems like only a trickle of power is getting through to the phone. When I plug a different USB 2 charging cable into the phone, without trying to power on, the charging icon appears but shows no charge at all in the battery.

I have also tried the spare battery I have but it’s still the same. I know the spare battery is 100% fully charged because I store it in a separate charging/storage box which shows a green LED when it is full. In fact the one which was in the phone at the time is also fully charged according to the charging box. Neither battery has got warm at all inside the phone. I’m confident both batteries are fully charged and totally fine and the problem isn’t with the batteries.

At this point I removed my sim card and also the MicroSD card. I needed the sim to use in my spare phone and I wanted to see if the sd card could be causing the issue but after again trying a normal reboot it made no difference.

I’ve tried several possible things I found on google but nothing has worked. Between each different thing I tried I had to remove the battery for 10 seconds and insert it again to get it out of the boot loop so I could try something else.

Initially when I tried booting into safe mode, then recovery mode and then download mode it brought up the screens for those but in each case after a few seconds the phone powered off and went into a boot loop so I couldn’t attempt any recovery options such as clearing cache etc. Now I cannot even get it to start any of those modes at all and all that happens is the phone does a little vibration, displays the Samsung logo and then just boot loops no matter what I try.

I have tried removing the battery and leaving the phone for a few hours then powering on again but it still just loops.

I have tried pressing and holding Vol-down when plugging it into my PC using a different USB 2 cable and windows acknowledged a phone was plugged in but said it couldn’t connect or recognise the phone and suggested the phone could have a fault.

I don't know if maybe my USB 3.0 lead has a fault that could have caused it or if there could have been some electricity spike while the phone was plugged in, or as I said a component has just fried.

I strongly suspect this is a hardware fault and not a software fault but as I’m not a phone engineer I have no idea about how to trace any possible hardware issues or what might have gone wrong. I would really appreciate any help or suggestions about what the problem might be as this has been a great phone for the last 2 years since I got it and I’d be sad to have to junk it and buy a new one.

Thank you.