[Q] Removal of BootLogo

Hello XDA!

Alright, I know that this subject has come up a couple of times on these forums and that there is no solution yet. But the last couple of days this has become a sort of personal vendetta kind of thing for me, and I want to see if we can maybe get a little further on this subject.

Bear with me a little bit because I am still quite noobish so things I say might not be true or make any sense.

So, what I am talking about is the removal of the BOOTLOGO, not to be mistaken with the BOOTANIM. I already know how to change the BOOTANIM and changed it to some delicious visuals, so this is not needed.

Furthermore I know that you can change the BOOTLOGO on the american versions of the Galaxy S3 with a simple .zip. This is of course is really awesome and stuff, but sadly I only have an international I9300, so it won't work for me.

So my first idea was to dig into the boot.img and see what I could do to make sure the BOOTLOGO just won't show. So I looked at the init.rc and found the following line:
export ANDROID_BOOTLOGO 1

I thought I had hit jackpot! not to rub any dirt on anyone's face, but I thought, "How could nobody on XDA have found this out????!!?!" So I changed it to:
export ANDROID_BOOTLOGO 0

Installed my ROM with this boot.img in it and waited, and .... still saw a BOOTLOGO, also a BOOTANIM... so.. it didn't work... Also when I pulled the init.rc using Android Commander is still showed the line "export ANDROID_BOOTLOGO 0" but apparently to no avail.

So I had kind of given up... I had read on different threads that the BOOTLOGO image is buried far into the depths of the filesystem that it isn't even changed when you install a rom! So I thought I would give up...

Until..:
A friend of mine had done something horribly wrong with his glass over his proximity sensor, so instead of just changing the glass we decided to do this software wise. I had found this thread where you could re-calibrate the sensor rewriting something in the efs file system. And this worked! quite easily actually.

And suddenly it hit me, it is probably the efs folder where the BOOTLOGO image is stored! So I made a backup of my efs folder and opened that.. (this took more tries, and I'm not sure with which steps I took to do this, but I'm willing to look it up .)
I found a couple of files but only 3 files bigger than 1kb (this is the only thing my windows 8 wants to show) and I think that the file with the image in it will probably be bigger than 1 kb.

So searching google and XDA I learned that if you want to do crazy things with IMEI and unlocking your phone and such you target the file .nv_data.bak, which is one of the bigger files. So I tried opening it with Notepad++ and HxD but I cannot make any sense of it...

The truth is I was hoping to find a .rle in this folder, which I could magically replace with my own BOOTLOGO and that would be it.

Bottom line:
I was hoping that someone could tell me if I am looking in the right direction (the efs folder and the .nv_data.bak file) and maybe even give directions on how to go further on from here to change the BOOTLOGO...

any ideas?

I would really really really like to get this thing done.

Frank

Info:
Phone: Samsung Galaxy S3 International (I9300)
Rom: SuperNexus 3.0 (would like to use SuperNexus 4.0 but I somehow get problems with Android Commander...)
Kernel: no clue (the one that came with SuperNexus)

Andr3y29
Thanks for your reply!

The thing you are talking about seems to be about the boot animation what I referred to as BOOTANIM. This is the animation that shows stuff like Cyanogenmod or something related to android or your carrier.
I'm talking about the BOOTLOGO, which comes before the BOOTANIM. The BOOTLOGO only shows a black screen with white letters saying "SAMSUNG GALAXY SII (I9300)" and this is what I want to remove.

Frank

boomboomer, thanks!

So, i guess looking in the efs folder is definitely the wrong place.

googling for the bootloader I found the following thread. Here someone is trying to change the bootlogo, and the conclusion seems to be that I need to change the sboot.bin.

So, i guess I'm going to research that!

thanks!
Frank

Ok, I made some progress

I downloaded the I9300 firmware from Sammobile.com and unpacked it and opened up the Sboot.bin. I couldn't open it with any archiving software but I could with HxD (Hexidecimal editor). There was a lot of gibberish but also some normal sentences and filenames, so I thought it looked a lot like a normal folder (or archive) that I just cannot open normally. But I thought that I might find the BOOTLOGO here in hex code.

So I opened up the logo.jpg from the param.bin in HxD and found ".Adobe Photoshop CS4 Windows.2012:04:23 14:30:18" in the header. In sboot.bin I looked for "Adobe Photoshop" and it came up just once. Looking at how the logo.jpg from param.bin looked and how big it was I copied the same from sboot.bin and saved it as a jpg. And it worked! So this is probably the logo that we see when we turn on our phone. (in the attachments)

I thought this would be it, just replace the hex code of the jpg with other jpg code and then flash this sboot.bin... but sadly this didn't work, Odin failed when it came to the sboot.bin. I started thinking that maybe the .bin knows where a file starts, so when I put a bigger or smaller .jpg in the sboot.bin it will mess up.. So I decided to change a few bits, which would make the image slightly more blue, but wouldn't make the file bigger, and it failed to flash... I though that it might be that the jpg is now broken and windows might be doing its best to interpret it but for the sgs3 it needs to be perfect, so I changed the header, turning Photoshop into Photopoop ( ), it failed to flash... Then I started thinking that the .bin file checks itself by making a sum of all its bytes, and if it is different it fails. So instead of making up my own bytes, I exchanged two bytes in the Photoshop string, making it Photohsop. But this still made the flashing fail.

I started thinking it might be HxD that messes up the sboot.bin file, so I tried to first change one byte, saved it, changed that byte back and saved it again. This time it flashed without a problem...

Now I'm kind of at an end, I have no clue how to solve this or how to go further... Does anyone maybe know how to edit sboot.bin, or how it is secured? Maybe the sboot.bin is checked against something else? Or I am doing something really stupid and there might be an easy fix (please please please)?

Kind Regards!
Frank

I think I need to bump this a little,

But does anyone know how the sboot.bin is checked by the sgs3 or odin?

Cheers!
Frank

Ai, I was afraid of that....

Does anyone else maybe have an idea?

Frank

boomboomer said:

You are attempting to flog a dead horse, no-one has bothered to decompile the bootloader for the i9300 as there is no point, it isn't locked. Only one American model had a lock, which was modded to enable flashing, nothing else.

Just to change the boot logo is a lot of work, for something that lasts just a few seconds.

Click to expand...

Click to collapse

Dear BoomBoomer! Thanks for your reply!

Sorry, I haven't replied in a while, but I looked a bit further into the sboot.bin and downloaded a couple more to see how they are different and are still able to flash. What I found is that the only difference is their build date and series nr. and 4 blocks of 256-byte signature (not sure if signature or checksum or something but I have to call it something..)
So I guess I need to figure out how to decompile these 256-byte signatures and make my own... to become awesome!

Dear BoomBoomer, I tried searching google and xda to find anything about the american model with sboot.bin but I found nothing. Do you maybe know the thread or person that modded the sboot.bin of the american version?

Thanks!
Frank

Adding Incentive

Hey guys,

I'm out on a limb here, but do you think I can maybe pay someone to help me with this?

Cheers,
Frank

Hello guys,

It has been a while since i started this threat but i'm still searching for a way to remove the bootlogo.
Do you guys have any ideas left i can try?
I'm willing to try everything even if there is a risk of bricking the phone.
I have 5 galaxy s3's here and i am willing to risk them to find a way to remove it.
If anyone has a method i can try please let me know.

Thanks!