For the last week ny phone has been hanging rather frequently, albeit a little inconsistently. At time the crashes are every 15 mins of use, yet I occasionally may go hours without a crash.

I was convinced I have a bad eMMC problem. Certainly eMMC check shows my chip as bad (04/12 0xf1 VTU00M).

When the issue occurred I quickly went back to stock XELLA, unrooted ready for service -- I'd been on MA2 and MR?, but last night I rerooted in order to run the memory test in eMMC check.

This ran 14.x GB totally clean - no hangs. I then connected with ADB and ran "dd if =/dev/mmcblk0" etc against the raw device & all partitions (12 I think) - again. All worked without a hitch. So by this time that's virtually 3 full clean reads.

I then ran fsck against all except /system (couldn't unmount) and these all also ran clean, not showing any errors.

So does this mean my hangs might not be bad eMMC? Could there be other nasty hang bugs lurking in XELLA? Could this be why we're still seeing some failures after return -- since in fact the HW wasn't bad after all (even if it was susceptible)?

---------- Post added at 07:57 AM ---------- Previous post was at 07:33 AM ----------

Originally Posted by FDisk80

OK guys, I am now 28 hours and 23 minutes up time without any freezes.

Nice -- I did try all of the above apart from
- I was unable to unmount /system (either in normal mode or stock recovery -- not tried CWM yet)
- I didn't run fstrim

and the hangs occured. Just run fstrim now, though I did check all memory was readable, and it was....

@planetf1:

No, this means that the problems occur when writing the eMMC, not reading.

Try to wait for the phone to unfreeze (5-25 minutes) it seems that it helps and the freezes get less.

If you have that kind of freezes, that are caused by the SD-Fix your phone will unfreeze after that time without reboot.

To provoke the freezes you can also empty your internal storage as much as possible and then use the dummy file generator (generate all) to fill the internal memory 1-2 times.
After each run you can simply delete the dummy files with the delete button.

I can't say for sure if this helps on every phone but since I did that dummy file procedure some times my phone is running withour freezes since some days.

BR
Robert

Both should be modified in XXEMR2 by Samsung I think, they must know the reason - so i'm waiting for XXEMR2 Users to report Freezes...

wow, I thought I was going bonkers. My SGS3 has been freezing up constantly for about a week now - but it doesn't have the eMMC bug. And I'm running CM10.1

Well. Not anymore. I'm currently downloading stock firmware so I can RMA it.

Originally Posted by JPsy Droid

Both should be modified in XXEMR2 by Samsung I think, they must know the reason - so i'm waiting for XXEMR2 Users to report Freezes...

Freezes are hereby confirmed
But, the Siyah 1.8.9 kernel seems to help a lot

EDIT: Looks like the SD-card is the problem... No hangs at all when the card is out

Originally Posted by QuaQuaRaQuaQua

Freezes are hereby confirmed
But, the Siyah 1.8.9 kernel seems to help a lot

EDIT: Looks like the SD-card is the problem... No hangs at all when the card is out

Yep same here. Started freezing today - reverted to stock from CM10.1 and it got worse. Went back to CM 10.1 and it had got worse.

Popped out my external card and no more freezes!

Originally Posted by QuaQuaRaQuaQua

Freezes are hereby confirmed
But, the Siyah 1.8.9 kernel seems to help a lot

EDIT: Looks like the SD-card is the problem... No hangs at all when the card is out

Originally Posted by ownjoouk

Yep same here. Started freezing today - reverted to stock from CM10.1 and it got worse. Went back to CM 10.1 and it had got worse.

Popped out my external card and no more freezes!

That is exactly what I tough in the beginning. Getting rid of the microSD card seems to have stopped the freezes for 4-5 days and then all the problems started again. I am completely stock at the moment with the microSD card in the phone and I have been freeze free for 14 day now. Other than formatting everything I didn't do anything special , the freezing just stopped.

How do you stop the mediascanner service ? How is it called ? Can you do it on a non-rooted phone ?

Originally Posted by ownjoouk

Yep same here. Started freezing today - reverted to stock from CM10.1 and it got worse. Went back to CM 10.1 and it had got worse.

Popped out my external card and no more freezes!

Originally Posted by maschenazi

That is exactly what I tough in the beginning. Getting rid of the microSD card seems to have stopped the freezes for 4-5 days and then all the problems started again. I am completely stock at the moment with the microSD card in the phone and I have been freeze free for 14 day now. Other than formatting everything I didn't do anything special , the freezing just stopped.

How do you stop the mediascanner service ? How is it called ? Can you do it on a non-rooted phone ?

Sheit... it freezes without the SD-card too

yar. I never had an external SD in mine.

The odd thing though is that under CM10.x, the eMMC checker app said my phone was fine. I wiped everything and reverted to stock (after huge amounts of swearing and frustration) and the app then reported that I have an 'insane chip'.
The only way I could get the phone working was to wipe all the memory - including clearing the 'sdcard' - and then installing a stock ROM. Ugh.

Let me repeat it again:
Whoever has problems with freezes, please try this at least and give positive or negative feedback here. We have good experience with this method to sightly reduce and/or completely eleminate the freezes.

Originally Posted by Rob2222

No, this means that the problems occur when writing the eMMC, not reading.

Try to wait for the phone to unfreeze (5-25 minutes) it seems that it helps and the freezes get less.

If you have that kind of freezes, that are caused by the SD-Fix your phone will unfreeze after that time without reboot.

To provoke the freezes you can also empty your internal storage as much as possible and then use the dummy file generator (generate all) to fill the internal memory 1-2 times.
After each run you can simply delete the dummy files with the delete button.

BR
Robert

https://play.google.com/store/apps/d...nomunomu.dummy

Free up 8GB or more to have enough free space on internal memory.

If you have 8 GB free internal space, write 2 times dummy files. 2x8GB are 16GB. The internal wear leveling algorithm spreads these writes over the whole 16GB physical chip area.

There is a good chance that writing EACH sector on the eMMC resets/averages out the internal block data (f.e. write counters) that trigger the Bug and the Fix (Freeze).

If the phone freezes while writing the dummy data (it propably will), just let the phone do what it wants. It will continue to work after 2-25 minutes for each freeze.
This unfreeze after 5-25 minutes seems to have a positive effect.
You can have more than one freeze while doing this. Just let the phone do what it wants. If the dummy file generator crashs cause of a freeze, just restart the App.

When your finally able to write a amount of 16GB data (2x8GB dummy files) in subsequent runs without freezes you have a good chance that your freezes are gone for now or maybe even forever.

You need to write a minimum amount of 16GB data (or more) with this procedure! If you write less data, you didn't even need to thest this DFG method.


The idea behind it:
The SD-Fix causes freezes when writing eMMC blocks in a specific eMMC block parameter state. There parameters are for example the block write counter. Just some few blocks are affected, but when they get written, the SD-Fix freezes the eMMC. Now it seems to have a positive ("healing") effect to wait for the eMMC to unfreeze itself, which happens after 5-25 minutes. For all day use this is not very practicable. So we write just some dummy data to the eMMC to trigger the freezes when we do have the time to wait for the unfreeze. Thats all.




EDIT 24.02.2013:
From the forums I monitor I get 80-90% positive feedback that the S3 gets again long-time-stable (usable) with this DFG-method.
I got from 10-15 freezes/day to only 1 single freeze in the last 2 weeks without factory reset.



EDIT 28.03.2013:
Some people needed to write 60-80GB of data until the phone became stable.
In the hardest case (only 1 case) I know, someone wrote about 1TB (1000GB) of data and then the phone became finally stable. He didn't got warranty so DFG was his last resort and after that it finally got stable.
In most cases 20-60GB written data should be enough to get back the phone on a stable state.

If youre familiar with odin, you can also flash XXEMB5 or newer firmware, cause it seems this includes a new, better SD-Fix that doesn't casue freezes anymore. DFG is not needed in this case.

BR
Robert