Ultimate GS3 sudden death thread

prashant.ks000 · Dec 21, 2012

Ultimate GS3 sudden death

What happened: All problem started after I updated phone to Android 4.1.1. on 22nd November, 2012. Dont know if it was mere co incidence of really on of the reason behind dying. Update had many bugs so had to get the new Jelly Bean updated again from Service center this time. After that phone worked fine for two days and when I was on my foreign trip, it stated to hang or freeze in middle of any work or during tranzition from one app to another. I had to pull out and put back the battery to restart it. On the day before dying, it hanged about 8-9 time and on the next day it hanged for one final time. After that it never restarted and it would freeze on boot screen. I had to remove battery to turn it off.

I gave phone to the service center and they took one week to fix it. This was seriously disappointing episode.

What ROM/Firmware:
What kernel:
OC or UV:
Where phone was made: Korea
Where battery was made: Korea

qazibasit · Dec 21, 2012

I am glad my note never experienced such issues. And for those with rooted s3 with custom roms, i have a question for you , "dont you people have any triangle away and binary counter reset apps for your phones?"

Sent from my GT-N7000 using xda app-developers app

justruss · Dec 21, 2012

Just wanted to note that I sent my dead phone to Samsung (Germany) and they replaced the main board and sent it back within about a week. Not bad. Now I hope it doesn't happen again...

firstknightfirst · Dec 21, 2012

checking in...

I have the same problem... usually when i unlock the phone nothing happens all it needs is a reboot. But this time it doesn reboot the last thing felt that it was hot. I was having scramble with friend on and it went to sleep on its own or i put it to sleep by pressing power off. So in to SC and out come a replaced motherboard.

Rooted at that time ICS with checkrom. siyah kernel then. no change made ....

International S3 (Malaysia)

gboydroid · Dec 21, 2012

good thing i havent experienced this problem with my s3. weird.

related article about dying young http://www.phonearena.com/news/Some-Samsung-Galaxy-S-III-units-are-dying-young_id37944

babblerx · Dec 21, 2012

This has happened to me as well

Just to add to the list (in the vague hope that Samsung might admit there is an issue)...

My phone died on 10/12/12 after being on charge overnight. Alarm went off at correct time (5.20am!!), took phone off charge and it cam out of standby, put it back into standby, shoved it in my pocket during half hour drive to work. At work, took it out of pocket to put on silent only to find it was completely dead.

Took it to Phones4U same day sho sent it off to repair centre and gave me repair tracking URL. It's taken a little longer than I would have liked to get sorted (though just under 2 weeks isn't too bad), but got an email from repair centre this morning saying the main board had been replaced and it will be sent back to my local Phones4U asap.

All in all, not too bad service wise, but it would have been nicer if it hadn't happened in the first place.

Just for info...my phone was purchased in June, only ever used stock ROM (with any updates always done vie KIES), running stock JB when it died.

Rich

drraptor · Dec 21, 2012

Please do mention your country and carrier (if carrier branded).

Albin0 · Dec 21, 2012

Happened to me with international version of SGS3. Phone was 3 months old.Never rooted,never flashed ,never charged with anything else than Samsung's original charger.Warranty wasn't voided.Put on charger on about 25-30 % battery.It just died over night during charging.No led flashing,no sign of life at all.Battery/SD removal trick didn't work.Battery swap with new one (stock original never used before-still on 40% factory charge) didn't work also.Carrier's SC replaced motherboard and shipped it back with JB 4.1.1 stock FW,took them 3 weeks to insert new MB into phone and ship it back.Fairly quick considering malfunction type.Carrier replced MB without any charge,under warranty with same IMEI as before malfunction.

FW was stock 4.04 last updated on 22nd August via OTA( pda I9300XXBLH1 csc I9300OXFBLH1 )
Kernel -stock
Root - none
Flash counter - 0
Production place - no idea
Battery production place -no idea (stock battery)
Carrier - VIP Serbia

gboydroid · Dec 21, 2012

btw after reading your experiences im a bit scared

hahaha

btw mine is manufactured @ vietnam

emreeken · Dec 21, 2012

My phone died on tuesday. Not after a full night charge. I locked the screen, when I tried to unlock, it didn't. And after that, it didn't turn on. I did not root, and I was using stock 4.1.1. I gave it to the service center and am waiting for answer. (I'm in Turkey and unbranded. I bought it in July 16.)

Criminal23 · Dec 21, 2012

qazibasit said:
And for those with rooted s3 with custom roms, i have a question for you , "dont you people have any triangle away and binary counter reset apps for your phones?"

How we should reset anything, when phone dosn't go on anymore, ...?

sent from my amazing SGS3 via Tapatalk

whitebait · Dec 21, 2012

So they saw my reddit post then?

hd779 · Dec 21, 2012

I emailed Phone Arena about this yesterday, glad to see them pick up on it and let people know. Hopefully this makes the rounds and stirs somethin up. I just hope it doesn't get pushed aside on american based sites because it appears isolated to the international s3. Its in everyone's best interest to hold Samsung accountable, maybe
they will start improving quality control. This is my third phone in the galaxy line ; the captivate, us galaxy s2 and now international s3. If this phone fails then all three will have suffered a significant hardware issue , before the phone was even a year old. I took precaution and bought a warranty to cover the phone for a year since international devices have no warranty in America and I don't know anyone in Trinidad and Tobago. But suffice it to say the S4 better be so impressive I can forget about all the issues I have had with Sammy Phones

MalboX · Dec 21, 2012

Great if it spread over blogs. I hope it will make Samsung give us some insights!

My GS3 left the local repair center to the factory one last week (from Paris, France). No news since.
I made a call and was told that it "takes 3 or 4 weeks" and that "no tracking information is available". Great, thanks

And I still don't know if it will lead to a "free" repair or to a costs estimate only.

No infos/news at all from Samsung France (via Twitter or phone support). I used #gs3suddendeath each time.

b0gd4n · Dec 21, 2012

I just checked the Carphone Warehouse repair tracker...I just got fixed

wohoo!

The tracker now says "great news! We've fixed your SAMSGHGLXYS3" - "preparing for delivery to store"

They did not call me to ask for any money (I had custom rom installed on it - so no warranty)...at least they did not ask me for money until now...hope they don't!

Entropy512 · Dec 21, 2012

corrsea said:
This is pure speculation. What if this is not accidental? What if some sicko is using the exynos exploit to kill S3s?

I don't actually believe that this is the case here but it certainly is technically possible and it's probably only a matter of time before somebody does attempt it.

Sent from my SGS3 using Tapatalk
ROM Sotmax Ultimate V10
Kernel Yank555.lu-V2.8c

There's no known way to cause damage like what is described intentionally on any GS3.

It is indeed possible to permanently destroy a GS2 device with only a few kilobytes of malicious payload now (abuse both Superbrick and exynos-abuse in one payload), but not a GS3.

whitebait said:
Well that sucks. I assumed they'd fixed the issue and were replacing our mainboards with a later revision. Giving us back the same revision is just going to leave us with the same problem in 6 months isn't it? Or could this be one dodgy batch of NAND chips and there's nothing wrong with the mainboard per se?

Back during the Superbrick fiasco days, people were getting replacements with the exact same defective eMMC chip for many months.

another point i searched the net and found on a site mobiletechvideos.com about a JTAG repair don't know much about it but found the phone working after that JTAG repair but they are situated abroad don't know how they are gonna help us JTAG repair cost was $50 so cheaper may be.
what do u say?? and how do we go about the claim from samsung....plz keep me posted.u can pm me at gauravinvouge@gmail.com

If anyone can bring back a device, it would be Josh Groce at MTV. HOWEVER - based on some of the descriptions here, it sounds like the parts of the eMMC chip are in la-la land, and not even JTAG may be able to resurrect the device. Unfortunately, once your device has been JTAGed, Samsung can see that the JTAG pads were soldered to and reject service for that. (Lots of Superbrick victims got ****ed this way.)

rookiegenius said:
now Im quite glad my S3 has the dual core instead of that quad core. That Exynos recently has proved itself nothing but trouble. probably the cause is the exynos.

I don't think so. It's starting to sound like an eMMC wear leveller defect to me... Samsung has an established track record of broken wear levellers at this point (see Superbrick).

All of the symptoms I'm seeing described (can enter download mode but DL mode can't do anything) indicate the main MMC flash region (mmcblk0) is toast, but the boot region (mmcblk0boot0) is still alive. If you read the JEDEC spec, there's some pretty low-level isolation between these regions and I don't think they share wear leveller data.

The thing is that in addition to having a different SoC, USA variants frequently will have somewhat different flash chips.

For example, international GS2 and Note1 devices were almost always VYL00M or MAG4FA fwrev 0x19 (bad). USA Note1 was Qualcomm AND it had VYL00M fwrev 0x25 (safe).

It would be nice to get some info on what flash chip was present in devices that died, but there's no way I can think of to do this without a variant of one of AdamOutler's recovery methods (SD that boots recovery or a kernel off of SD and pulls the NAND flash info - something like this won't be able to resurrect a device though based on the described symptoms.) Flash chips that haven't died aren't particularly useful unless people write it down and THEN post it IF their device dies. (Having people who are still alive post chip data will just clutter this thread with uselessness - only if some people write it down and THEN their device dies will the data be useful.)

shethsa · Dec 21, 2012

Someone sensible from Sammy India called me to reassure that they'll be taking a deep look at my damaged mobo and maybe, just maybe, it's not a case of water logging. I'm sure they're monitoring this site as well because I told them to. For now it's a new mobo and less $140 from my pocket.

Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk 2

InfX · Dec 21, 2012

Entropy512 said:
... It's starting to sound like an eMMC wear leveller defect to me... Samsung has an established track record of broken wear levellers at this point (see Superbrick)...

That's what i am thinking too, do you have any details on the wear leveling in use? Starting from the basic things, such as, is it static or dynamic, ending with the details of the broken wear levelers you've mentioned? This thread has currently spooked me to the level i've rebind my external sd card to be used as an "internal" ones, in order to minimize the flash writes to some extent

etique57 · Dec 21, 2012

My case:

GS3 I9300, rooted, WanamLite 5.0.

Left my phone on the table in the evening, battery probably got exhausted overnight. Never, ever came back to any sign of life. Not even a battery led when charging.

It is now gone in Warranty, waiting to get it back sometime next week. Hopefully they won't notice about the rooting.

msbmsb · Dec 21, 2012

I posted my experience here on the 19th of Nov, not seeing this thread until just now (since mine is a US version).

What happened:
Just prior to the Jelly Bean OTA:
1. All the sensors stopped working - gyro, proximity, etc. They all stopped working. They wouldn't come back on a restart either. I was getting ready to try a factory reset when the Jelly Bean OTA came.
After updating to Jelly Bean:
2. Updated to Jelly Bean, sensors started working again, but the phone would randomly restart, in my pocket, just sitting there on the table...
3. On Saturday I used the phone a little, just like normal. About 45 minutes after making a call and not using the phone again, I noticed that the phone was dead. I plugged it in thinking something had drained the battery.
4. When trying to power it up, it would vibrate once, sometimes twice but the screen stayed black.
5. I tried taking the battery out for a while, replaced it and turned it on - it started booting up, but before fully initializing, rebooted again and then went black.
6. Once i got a charging screen when i plugged it in, but could never replicate.
7. Became totally hardbricked. Can't get into download mode, can't factory reset, nothing at all. No vibrate, nothing. I fully charged the battery to make sure, and nothing. It's totally dead and unresponsive.
8. On receiving the warranty replacement SG3, I tried turning on the original once more, as a test. To my surprise, after several days of being powered off, it came back up and seemed to be working fine. It ran normally for a day and a half, at which point it then began to reboot, after turning on the GPS for the first time (whether that's actually related or not is unknown, just a note). It would either reboot immediately on the first screen unlock, or it would reboot while booting up.
9. Fortunately, this did give me an opportunity to factory reset. For anyone suspecting it had something to do with a rogue app, the phone would reboot on the very first initialization screen, where you enter your gmail account info.
10. Returned original unit.

What ROM/Firmware:
Stock USA T-Mobile Jelly Bean

Purchased on July 6, died on Nov 16, so about 130 days time.

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