[Q] Stuck at Samsung logo during boot even on stock rom

I have soft bricked and then recovered a lot of devices but this one has me stumped. I tried to install a custom kernel that I compiled myself using odin. When that didn't work I tried to copy the image using dd. My theory is that I wrote to the wrong block device and broke something. When it wouldn't boot I figured it was no big deal, I'll just revert to stock. I have tried flashing the stock rom with Odin and by using Kies emergency recovery. Both seem to succeed but whenever I boot I just get stuck at the samsung logo which displays on the screen forever. I can still get into download mode and recovery mode just fine.

Things I have tried:

- Factory reset (I've done this many times from stock recovery and TWRP)
- Cache wipe (Also tried several times from stock recover and TWRP - in TWRP I tried all the different wiping options)
- Flash stock ROM
- Turn off device and wait for more than an hour (since there is no way to do a battery pull)

My understanding is that the bootloader must be functioning otherwise I would not be able to get as far as I do. And since flashing stock ROM doesn't do anything there must be a partition with corrupt data that is not being rewritten when I install the ROM. Any ideas what this might be? Are there any resources I can use to completely repartition the device?

Any ideas are appreciated.

I fixed my problem so I just though I'd post the solution here in case someone finds this on Google or something.

It seems that I did indeed corrupt a partition that is not rewritten when you flash a stock rom or do an emergency system restore with kies (which I believe does nothing more than download the stock rom and then flash it). I actually had to buy a second device and use dd to copy over all the partitions and then returned the second device

So if you have this problem you might have to ask someone on this forum to give you an image of whichever partition you broke.