[General Questions and Answers] 4rg3ntum:
Hi All,

Been at this for several hours today and feeling a bit frustrated. Here's the context.

I bought a used Verizon Galaxy Note 10 and took it to another country.

I arrived and put a sim card in *(the phone is intended to stay here)

4G signal appeared and text messages came in

Phone blocked signal and said "sorry, your device cannot be activated on another Network right now" then it says to call Verizon.

I call Verizon and ask how to unlock.

After transferring to multiple agents, the answer is that the phone is not locked in their system and that upon inserting a SIM from another carrier, I should be prompted to put in a code and it will be "00000000" to unlock the phone

The phone never presents this option and is perpetually unable to activate because of this sim lock.

At this point, I started reading up on how I could get around this and settled on using odin to flash firmware for a different carrier and maybe having to flash the SM-N970U1 packages because that should allow me to have different stock firmware.

So I proceed to download various different images.

Here is the TMB image for SM-N970U that I downloaded:

https://samfw.com/firmware/SM-N970U/TMB/N970USQU6FUBH

I also figured maybe I would be able to flash the verizon base image and get around this lock:

https://samfw.com/firmware/SM-N970U/VZW/N970USQU6FUCD

So then I proceed to use Odin3_v3.14.4 and place all of the 4 files in their corresponding fields in odin. The file list is as follows for one of the packages:

BL_N970USQU6FUD9_CL21599467_QB39871099_REV00_user_low_ship_MULTI_CERT.tar.md5

AP_N970USQU6FUD9_CL21599467_QB39871099_REV00_user_low_ship_MULTI_CERT_meta_OS11.tar.md5

CP_N970USQU6FUD9_CP19049000_CL21599467_QB39871099_REV00_user_low_ship_MULTI_CERT.tar.md5

CSC_OMC_OYN_N970UOYN6FUD9_CL21599467_QB39871099_REV00_user_low_ship_MULTI_CERT.tar.md5

I click start, the phone is recognized and then the flashing appears to occur successfully until it says pass at the end.

I reboot the phone and I notice right away that the signal is present, but then disappears and as the phone initializes the VERIZON message appears again.

Immediately I'm thinking, ok, I've just reflashed it with the TMobile image but the phone boots and says verizon and the sim lock is still there, so I probably didn't do something right.

So I factory reset, try again, no changes, I try adding the USERDATA and it also does nothing different.

At this point I'm willing to try the U1 firmware, so I download from here:

https://xdaforums.com/t/n970u-and-n970u1-firmware-links-here.3957705/

But when I run the odin flash, I get model mismatch, yet the thread says they're compatible as U1 is just the samsung unlocked version. so I try the odin patch b found here:

https://odindownload.club/download/197/Odin3-v3.14.1-3B-PatcheD.zip

And it fails to write.

I am in desperate need of help as I've been unable to find more specific information, typically in threads people may say they've resolved the issue, but then they don't actually indicate what steps they took, or any of the details surrounding the resolution. If I can get help getting this resolved, I can document the exact steps i've taken in explicit detail so that others can follow them and achieve the same result.