[Galaxy Grand 2 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] EoflaOE:
Hello, guys and gals!

I think that I may have messed my only phone up too much. My phone is a Samsung Galaxy Grand 2 Duos SM-G7102 ms013g that was bought around 2014.

Some background info (very long, if you don't want to waste your time reading all this, skip all the grey parts until you reach "The Problem"):

It was originally owned by my mother. It all started when my local carrier decided back in around 2015 or 2016 that my Windows Mobile phone that was running Windows Mobile 6.0 until it hard bricked itself that their network is no longer compatible, I waited patiently until my mother had been gifted a completely new phone in 2019. This resulted in my mother giving me her old phone with my SIM card in.

In late 2020, I started using my phone for hanging out with my friends, but I also started charging it with the power brick that I have until I finished all my conversations each day. It was performant at the time.

When I started using Instagram, I realized that I couldn't post pictures, so I started investigating the app info and found that it's running a version which was released in 2018. The newer updates required running Android Lollipop or greater, so I installed custom ROMs that allowed me to run the latest version of Android. The last ROM that I flashed was Resurrection Remix Nougat.

Because I bought a Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 that came with Android 12 back in June 2021, I decided to update my phone to LineageOS 19.1 with Android 12L obtained from this thread: https://xdaforums.com/t/rom-unofficial-ms013g-12-lineageos-19-1-stable.4516799/ on November 2022. Everything went fine until 2023 started.

The Problem

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My phone was running Android 12 in a semi-stable fashion, with the following issues discovered:

- Taking very long to boot up because it was showing the Samsung logo for around 2-3 minutes

- Some of the UI is not running at 60 FPS, especially when scrolling down the notification bar

Now, it was suffering from a major problem, which made me have to update the time and the date each time my phone booted up. Upon reboot or a cold boot, the phone would reset its time and date to a date and time that I've installed Android 12 on back then. This resulted in my phone not connecting to WiFi until I set the date and the time back to today's date.

Thinking that it's from LineageOS 19.0, I proceeded to download LineageOS 18 Android 11 Go (https://xdaforums.com/t/rom-android-11-go-ms013g-lineageos-18-1.4512867/) and TWRP 3.7.0-9 (https://xdaforums.com/t/recovery-ms013g-twrp-3-7-0_9-0-for-ms013g.4514667/), fully understanding the warnings that may have come with both the threads. Then, I rebooted my device to recovery.

First, I ran a backup of my device, but I saw that everytime I make a complete backup off TWRP, the compressed size was actually bigger than the total size by around 40 MB. When that finished, I proceeded to install TWRP to the recovery partition by clicking on the Install Image button and selecting the TWRP image. I then rebooted into recovery again and saw that it's running the updated version.

I proceeded to wipe the device completely (dalvik, system, cache, data) except the external SD card that was holding the ROM files, which went fine. I then went ahead to install the Go version of the ROM as per the thread's direction that tols me not to flash Gapps as MicroG was already included, which made the ROM lighter.

When that finished, I rebooted the phone to find that it successfully booted to Android 11, with the setup wizard showing up. It even detected my SIM card that was inserted to my phone. All went fine until I tried to access the Aurora Store, and saw that it couldn't find any application, resulting in the store only showing "No available apps" or something like that.

Next, I proceeded to download the Windscribe VPN, and saw that while the browser was loading sites fast, the download was very slow. It said that it's going to take one hour, which I wasn't going to wait for because it was too late. All that despite having an 8 Mbps connection supported by the fiber optic and not the copper ADSL wires.

As a result, I thought that maybe it was the system, so I rebooted Android.

The date and the time reset again back to when I first installed Android 12 (November 2022), but now it showed me a completely new issue. I wasn't prompted for the SIM unlock code as it used to prompt me for each time I reboot. Even worse, when I opened my phone, it no longer detected my SIM card!

When I checked the system information, I saw that the IMEI numbers went to Unknown for both my SIM card slots. My SIM card was placed on the first SIM slot. I decided that enough was enough and rebooted my phone to the TWRP recovery.

I wiped everything again (dalvik, system, cache, data) and tried to restore the phone from backup, but at the end of restoring the system, the recovery turned itself off, flashed the black screen for a millisecond, then went back to the main home screen for the recovery. I tried again, but it's the same.

So, I decided to re-install the whole Android 12 ROM from scratch, but instead of installing Gapps, I installed MicroG. I then rebooted the phone to see that instead of booting up, it's now stuck in a reboot loop.

The Samsung logo showed up for around 2 minutes and then the LineageOS boot animation showed up. After another 2 minutes, I saw that the backlights turned on. However, it kept on instead of turning off. As a result, my phone kept trying to boot until the screen went darker and the backlight turned off. After few seconds, the phone rebooted and it kept doing this cycle.

I rebooted the phone to the recovery, thinking that it might have been a compatibility issue with the recovery that I've installed, to wipe everything again. I restored the earlier working recovery, and installed Android 12 and MicroG. I rebooted, but the problem still persisted.

I rebooted the phone again to the recovery, and, this time, I reinstalled Android 12 with the Gapps package made for Android 12L. I rebooted the phone to finally see the setup wizard, but when I clicked on Start, the "Factory data reset" popup appeared with "Rebooting" underneath it. This caused my phone to reboot continuously.

I rebooted the phone to recovery to reinstall the latest recovery available for my phone. I think I may have killed my phone's software while trying to restore the Android 12 software. The time was too late, so I left my phone in the recovery mode at 100% battery charge.

I did the factory reset, but when I rebooted the phone, the "Factory data reset" popup still didn't go away. This time, when I rebooted to recovery, it showed 4% battery.

Below shots in the attachments are trying to describe what I'm seeing in my phone, the /system partition, and the /system_root partition before and after wipes as I thought that the /system_root might be the cause.

I currently restored the recovery partition to go back to the older TWRP that didn't have /system_root.

I can't afford to buy another phone, even the mid-range ones like the Samsung Galaxy A53 or the upcoming A54, because the prices in our country recently had a huge inflation. Also, this is my only phone because my last phone, Windows Mobile, hard bricked itself.

Despite my 10 years experience with dealing with Android tablets and phones, this is my first time experiencing a problem that I can't seem to fix. I'm at a loss as to what to do now, so any kind of help would be appreciated.

Also, what caused my phone to behave like this? Should I start over by flashing the latest stock Samsung firmware from Odin?