**Ultimate GS3 sudden death thread**
- Thread starter Obagleyfreer
- Start date
yep they said TE]
and they probably will update the eMMC firmware ( maybe with the new bootloader )
Yes the current btu release (today)apparently has sudden death fix via the bootloader.
I recommend updating via pc odin as mobile odin won't fix the bootloader, Im already on samsung 4.1.2 release at christmas just downlaoding todays release.
the bootloader already in the device and Rom will not change it , u have to use Odin to get the new bootloader
edit : ota or kies will probably update the bootloader too
Last edited:
that are only rumors! only thing that's committed is that the exploit is fixed!
Gesendet von meinem GT-I9300 mit Tapatalk 2
My phone didn't die, however for the 2nd time, I have this issue:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo46OXWEcX0&feature=share&list=UU8lQQBUbqHNLkHxthkkmmJg
A whole thread for this issue exists here, since August. Nobody is talking about it. Please help spread awareness so Samsung fixes it: http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1889354
I live in New York. I contacted Samsung US and they said they only repair American models (because the US models have different hardware). Samsung UK said that they can repair it in the UK or any EU country as long as it was coming from a UK/EU address (this was my issue). So I contacted the company I bought it from on Amazon.com, and they acted as middleman. It cost me $80 to ship via Fedex and the whole thing took me about a month to get my phone back. It was a hardware component failure (trust me, I tried EVERYTHING to get it work again). The repair center the company sent it to (Komsa) included a paper in the return package that said they replaced a part. I found a file in the /nvdata folder on my replacement that had IMEI writing history, and basically showed the IMEI was overwritten. So they replaced the entire motherboard and copied over my old IMEI.
This was September, and I got it back October. On New Years day (1/1/13), it started AGAIN. The company said Samsung doesn't issue replacements until after 3 repairs are done. I don't know what to do. I don't have any spare phones, and I don't want to pay another $80 to ship my phone and wait a month. Especially since the entire motherboard was replaced and it still happened again. I'm extremely angry because my phone is useless for phone calls.
Symptoms:
- On making a call, I get no audio going in or out. However both speakers are work fine, because the earpiece makes a beep sound to let me know call forwarding is active. The rear one works for everything. The call connects at first, but there's no sound. I know because the call timer starts counting up.
- Headphones in call don't work either, but they work fine for anything else.
- Sometimes I get sound for one call until I hang up, or it's very crackly and
useless (this was the first time it happened, but not right now [yet])
- While ringing when dialing out (or rather, when you WOULD be hearing ringing if it was working), sometimes it'll cut the call and say "OUT OF SERVICE AREA", and then I'll get the circle with the line through it where signal is supposed to be. Signal is back seconds later.
- Data and texting work fine.
Things I've tried:
- I was on Omega ROM 13.1 with Siyah 1.5.3, although I've read online people have this issue bone stock, unrooted.
- Flashed stock insecure kernel
- Flashed several different modems
- ODIN'd back to the ROM that came with the phone (was originally a real-SIM-unlocked, Vodafone UK i9300).
- Wiped everything possible
----------
Bought the phone in July 2012. Had it for about 6 months now. It had the first issue about 3 months in. Now again 3 months later. It's a white 16GB i9300 originally from Vodaphone UK, however I live in NYC and I use it on Straight Talk AT&T.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo46OXWEcX0&feature=share&list=UU8lQQBUbqHNLkHxthkkmmJg
A whole thread for this issue exists here, since August. Nobody is talking about it. Please help spread awareness so Samsung fixes it: http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1889354
I live in New York. I contacted Samsung US and they said they only repair American models (because the US models have different hardware). Samsung UK said that they can repair it in the UK or any EU country as long as it was coming from a UK/EU address (this was my issue). So I contacted the company I bought it from on Amazon.com, and they acted as middleman. It cost me $80 to ship via Fedex and the whole thing took me about a month to get my phone back. It was a hardware component failure (trust me, I tried EVERYTHING to get it work again). The repair center the company sent it to (Komsa) included a paper in the return package that said they replaced a part. I found a file in the /nvdata folder on my replacement that had IMEI writing history, and basically showed the IMEI was overwritten. So they replaced the entire motherboard and copied over my old IMEI.
This was September, and I got it back October. On New Years day (1/1/13), it started AGAIN. The company said Samsung doesn't issue replacements until after 3 repairs are done. I don't know what to do. I don't have any spare phones, and I don't want to pay another $80 to ship my phone and wait a month. Especially since the entire motherboard was replaced and it still happened again. I'm extremely angry because my phone is useless for phone calls.
Symptoms:
- On making a call, I get no audio going in or out. However both speakers are work fine, because the earpiece makes a beep sound to let me know call forwarding is active. The rear one works for everything. The call connects at first, but there's no sound. I know because the call timer starts counting up.
- Headphones in call don't work either, but they work fine for anything else.
- Sometimes I get sound for one call until I hang up, or it's very crackly and
useless (this was the first time it happened, but not right now [yet])
- While ringing when dialing out (or rather, when you WOULD be hearing ringing if it was working), sometimes it'll cut the call and say "OUT OF SERVICE AREA", and then I'll get the circle with the line through it where signal is supposed to be. Signal is back seconds later.
- Data and texting work fine.
Things I've tried:
- I was on Omega ROM 13.1 with Siyah 1.5.3, although I've read online people have this issue bone stock, unrooted.
- Flashed stock insecure kernel
- Flashed several different modems
- ODIN'd back to the ROM that came with the phone (was originally a real-SIM-unlocked, Vodafone UK i9300).
- Wiped everything possible
----------
Bought the phone in July 2012. Had it for about 6 months now. It had the first issue about 3 months in. Now again 3 months later. It's a white 16GB i9300 originally from Vodaphone UK, however I live in NYC and I use it on Straight Talk AT&T.
can you tell pls where we can download the latest firmware which apparently has a sudden death fix. Thnks.
http://www.sammobile.com/firmware/?page=3&model=GT-I9300&pcode=BTU&os=1&type=1#firmware
---------- Post added at 10:11 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:08 PM ----------
Hence why i put apparently only time will tell or samsung will push another update soon.
---------- Post added at 10:11 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:08 PM ----------
Hence why i put apparently only time will tell or samsung will push another update soon.
I've been getting the lags, freezes, and crashes ever since Christmas, but XXELLA hasn't helped me, it's still doing it.
lets hope the mofos will bring a fix for this problem very quick and it did not damage our phones right now.
is any tehcnical user here on the forum that is able to explain to me in simple language:
If this wear levelling problem already damaged our phones and shortens the lifetimes even if samsung brings a fix today.
Or that this is not the case.. and why this is not the case.
is any tehcnical user here on the forum that is able to explain to me in simple language:
If this wear levelling problem already damaged our phones and shortens the lifetimes even if samsung brings a fix today.
Or that this is not the case.. and why this is not the case.
Because simple: its broken or not broken...something like: "my memory is a little broken" doesnt happen.
So If your phone havnt died yet its fine
Sent from my GT-I9300 using xda app-developers app
Not quite - if the wear levelling algorithm is poor, and is wearing out sectors unevenly, they may be dying early, and perhaps they're not getting marked as bad, which is why we're occasionally getting crashes or freezes, and the system attempts to write/read from bad sectors.
It could be fixed by properly marking those sectors as bad, but they'll always be bad, so yes, permanent wear which can't be repaired through software.
this explanation doesn't help me.
Do you understand how this wear levelling works and how it can brick your device after 6 monthswork? please give me an proper explanation
As from my case, Samsung is trying their best to keep quite about it.
They are aware of the issue, and they know it's their fault. >.<
Firmware update might fix things. It's probably writing to /emmc.
All the best guys. :good:
They are aware of the issue, and they know it's their fault. >.<
Firmware update might fix things. It's probably writing to /emmc.
All the best guys. :good:
Thanks, but does this mean that the device will brick once a time but later, or what does this mean. is the device lagging because of the bad sectors, and is there any tool that can check bad sectors or is there a read/write speed that is normal for a good working new s3 without bad sectors? please explain more about this i like to know :laugh:
Yes but its like a chain reaction: if one component or sector dies mostly the other ones will follow. Freezes and hookups are those signs of hardware failure.
As long if those symptoms doesnt apair you dont need to worry too much
Sent from my GT-I9300 using xda app-developers app
I realise that, but you said "its broken or not broken" - I was merely pointing out it's not quite as simple as that.
IF this is the problem (we're only speculating still), then theoretically Samsung could fix the wear problem, mark the bad sectors as bad properly, and the problem shouldn't return. Therefore, it's not either "broken or not broken".
People might lose a few bytes/kilobytes/megabytes of their memory, but they shouldn't notice.
is there a way to check the status of bad sectors or it is measurable in read write speed ? or am i wrong?
---------- Post added at 11:42 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:41 PM ----------
Oke and would this not happend if they had fixed it before the phone came out?
If i understand you, you have 2 updates?
One regular 4.1.2. and second was today with this fix for suddent death? How large is this second update?
I have stock phone. I dont use odin or kies.
I've been waiting for ota update. Will this work for my device, or should I do it with odin?
Sent from my GT-I9300 using xda app-developers app
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85**** SAMSUNG HAVE APPLIED A SUDDEN DEATH FIX VIA A SOFTWARE UPDATE****
STOCK KERNEL: XXELKC AND NEWER
STOCK RECOVERY: XXELKC AND NEWER
ALSO ANY CUSTOM KERNEL AND RECOVERY THAT ARE BUILT FROM THE UPDATED SOURCES. THERE HAVE BEEN CASES OF SDS ON DEVICES THAT HAVE UPDATED BUT TO WHAT EXTENT THE DAMAGE WAS AT ALREADY BEFORE FLASHING WE DON'T KNOW.
WHO'S AFFECTED?
It seems that at the moment the only devices that have suffered from SDS are the 16GB version with:
eMMC: VTU00M
FW Rev: 0xF1
To check your eMMC version download eMMC Brickbug Check from Google Play.
What you want is the eMMC version and the FW Rev.
THE FIX
Samsung have now released a Sudden Death Fix via a patched Kernel and Recovery in latest firmware. Firmware Version: XXELKC
Simply update OTA or download XXELKC firmware (or newer) from sammobile.com and flash using Odin.
You need both the stock recovery and kernel installed for it to work properly, or a custom kernel and recovery built from the updated sources
ie Latest Perseus Kernel and PhilZ Recovery are examples
LINKS
For more info about SDS, who could be effected and how to fix check out this awesome thread by rootSU
For a detailed look at how the fix works check out this thread here.
WARRANTY
For those of you in Europe who have rooted your phone it appears that this doesn't void warranty. Check this thread for more info.
Also this website could prove very handy for anyone with a European or UK handset that has died.40
You won't. These are HIGHLY proprietary to Samsung's storage people.Just took a look at the diffs and i have to admit, i don't nearly get what this does. What are those "movi commands"? Where can one find a data-sheet to decode the magics?
BTW, just took the kernel image from the WanamLite v5.3 CWM zip (that's what i am currently running), un-gz-ed it, and actually found the "movi operation is failed" error string in there. Good for me, i guess
AndreiLux, thanks A LOT for your research.
Bah, I wish I could see what you quoted. As far as safety goes:
90%+ chance that the change in Update7 is the fix.
75% chance that XXELLA/4/etc have the fix (It's possible, but highly unlikely, that the string VTU00M would appear in the kernel without the fix.
This isn't about bad blocks - this is about a firmware bug where a data structure gets suddenly corrupted. You can really only know "is it working" or "is it dead". The one exception seems to be that some people see odd performance issues just before death, similar to the issues people see when using PIT workarounds for Superbrick.
Just as I said above, the low-level details of what's going on are HIGHLY proprietary to Samsung.
Yeah. I'm wondering if we should add some printk()s to check what the date is. I'm curious if there are other dates floating around.
Correct, although we could add a printk to kernels to print out the info.
Correct.
No. Seriously - READ. It is at this point unambiguously an eMMC firmware failure that has NOTHING to do with the charger.
The ONLY connection with charging is this: CHARGING HOLDS A WAKELOCK. This means the device will do various tasks in the background that it wouldn't do in deep sleep, some of which perform I/O cycles on the eMMC.
So far all of them were running other kernels.
It's just like the people who claimed they Superbricked on stock recovery. Turns out that in their eyes, fakeflashing CWM from stock recovery was still in some twisted way stock recovery... It wasn't.
Perseus is 90% guaranteed to be safe (I'm not claiming 100% without a detailed technical explanation from Samsung. Even then I'm not claiming 100%, just like I refuse to guarantee that nonsecure erase is safe on Superbrick-vulnerable devices even though Samsung claims it is... As a result anything I release has eMMC TRIM/ERASE completely disabled for those devices.
ELLA/4/etc are 75%+ guaranteed to be safe - since we THINK they have the same patch
Samsung's storage guys have a wide variety of chips/models. VTU00M 0xf1 is primarily seen in I9300 units, and almost all 16GB I9300s except very recent ones have it. Some other devices have it, but it isn't nearly as prevalent in other devices. My Note 10.1 has MAG4FB I think (need to check again...) In addition, there appears to be some additional identifying information beyond VTU00M 0xf1 that we haven't had time to collect data on yet (and developers need to make kernel patches to even allow this data to be collected...)
the key in that post is the word "now". That post was made yesterday - the patch has been making the rounds and is getting integrated
That's something that needs to be checked... However if it appears in older kernels Samsung was violating the GPL with them as I'm fairly certain it is nowhere within the source.
Just like Superbrick.Nothing can fix an SDS because the phone is already dead.
But to prevent it, yes it seems. One of those at this moment.
On a small subset of affected devices they have - I9100s in HK apparently have Jellybean and that has their official fix. But so far, nearly all affected devices are still on ICS and they only put the fix in JB kernels.Samsung haven't fixed the super brick bug yet
Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk 2
Unknown. Often flaws like this are firmware-dependent.Just did a emmc check and I found out that my fwrev is oxf7 and the date is 11/2012... But I got the same chip like otherss...
So am I on a safer side?
Sent from my GT-I9300 using xda app-developers app
For example:
VYL00M/KYL00M/MAG4FA fwrev 0x19 = Superbrick + 32kb-of-zeroes bug
VYL00M/KYL00M/MAG4FA fwrev 0x25 = 32kb-of-zeroes bug only (immune to Superbrick)
However for the above, we had confirmation from a trusted source (A Google engineer) that 0x19 had a bug with the symptoms we were seeing and that HE had seen it in GNex prototypes, and that 0x25 was "fixed" in regards to that bug (Superbrick). A fix for the bug in 0x25 is what led us to him.
Not necessarily. I would put the status as "unknown". If you have VTU00M 0xf7 you're much less likely to have problems than 0xf1 - but with something like this guarantees cannot be made.Theoretically if you have the same chip, you are candidate for sds sometime....
Also: The fix patch was merged to CM10.1 source last night. So today's nightly should be safe. If it's not - no one is safe.30
If you have VTU00M fwrev 0xf1 flash, you are probably at risk. I9305 is too new to tell
No. In fact, there's nothing that indicates there is a bug in the bootloader/kernel/system firmware yet. Given the behavior of the problem and Samsung's past history, it's likely a bug in internal eMMC firmware (which can, at best be field-patched if it only involves a few bytes of microcode - major changes are not possible in the field.) This upcoming update likely contains a workaround for that eMMC bug.
Look at the Superbrick bug - There was no underlying "bug" in any of Samsung's firmwares, except that they didn't block commands that would trigger a known bug in the underlying flash memory. Now, in any hardware without that bug, issuing secure erase commands is fine. The workaround for the bug is simple: Don't send secure erase commands to the damn chip.
Unknown. Right now any device with VTU00M flash is at risk - but how high the risk is we don't know.
No one knows yet. If it's done in the kernel, we'll know EXACTLY what/how they fixed it and how to apply the fix to custom firmwares. If it's the bootloader, we won't know unless they explicitly states that they changed the bootloader to fix it. If it's in /system (HIGHLY unlikely) we might see something.
Most likely place they'll fix this is the kernel with a variant of the Sumrall patch from last spring, OR an alteration to the MMC code in order to avoid doing something (we don't know what) that the chip doesn't like (this would be similar to how Superbrick is worked around). So far, every time Samsung has ever fixed or worked around an eMMC bug/defect, it's been in the kernel and not the bootloader. So everyone flashing this new bootloader is just making it more likely they'll be denied warranty support if their device dies.
Bull****. You have ZERO evidence to substantiate this claim.
And why do you think it's the bootloader? There's no evidence to say WHERE the fix will be applied because there isn't even any information about HOW the failures are occurring. Right now, I'd say it's most likely going to be a kernel fix.
If it's a wear leveller bug, there's a possibility fixed wear leveller firmware might "repair" damage to the internal data structures.
Search before posting. I posted an example of how this has been done to Samsung eMMC chips in the past only 1-2 days ago. (Search this thread for Sumrall...)
Minor eMMC microcode updates can be done at runtime. It's fairly safe since it apparently patches the firmware after it has loaded into volatile memory (and hence a power cycle removes the patch if it's misapplied). This is what the Galaxy Nexus patch for VYL00M/KYL00M/MAG4FA fwrev 0x25 did.
Major eMMC microcode updates can't be done so easily, which is why the underlying Superbrick flaw was never fixed.
Don't make definitive claims you have no evidence to support.27
We will likely never know the specific secret component, but with knowledge of the behavior of eMMC, how it behaves, and how Samsung eMMCs have failed in the past, we can guess.
The wear leveller keeps track of what memory blocks have been used and what haven't, and relocates blocks periodically to spread wear across the device. For example, if you write to the fourth block of the eMMC repeatedly, internally it'll map the fourth block to the 100th, then maybe the 150th, then 200th, etc...
At some point, after a long time of operation, the wear leveller might reach a corner case where a bug is triggered - my guess would be an integer overflow or a signed vs. unsigned issue. For example, it's working with the 32767th instance of block 5, and tries to increment a counter to 32768 - but instead, gets -32768 instead because something is treating an unsigned int as signed. The next time it tries to work with that counter, BOOM - it crashes. Again, we don't know the exact nature of what's happening, but it's likely something along these lines.
It's very similar to what happened with Superbrick on the GS2 - if you issued a secure erase command to erase memory that was in a certain specific state (I can't talk about what the exact state is, sorry... And no, there's no way to tell if the memory is in that state unless you're Samsung or you've Superbricked it.), the wear leveller would crash and leave behind corrupted data structures - any attempt to access these structures again would crash the wear leveller again. The symptom to the user was any attempt to access affected regions of the eMMC would cause the chip to hang.22
I have yet to see any such reports... The one report I've seen of an XXELLA failure was XXELLA system + Siyah.
I have all of the evidence I need - I now have kernel source for a complete eMMC firmware patch. The fix is in the kernel, not in the bootloader. It's being patched in the EXACT same way as the GNex 32kb-of-zeros fix patch, which had zero bootloader involvement.
The fact is that flashing a bootloader is a fundamentally dangerous operation, and flashing a bootloader with known regressions in functionality is 100% reckless and stupid.
The fact is that Samsung has NEVER fixed a problem like this in the bootloader before. There was ZERO evidence pointing there. There was plenty of evidence (the GNex VYL00M/KYL00M/MAG4FA 0x25 patch) pointing to the fix being in the kernel when it came out.
All of the symptoms and behavior pointed this way.
1) Some devices were exhibiting "Superbrick-ish" behavior where certain eMMC regions were working and others were inaccessible
2) It was ONLY happening on 16GB devices - this is the most obvious piece of evidence. If it weren't the eMMC, it would have been seen on 32/64GB devices
3) It would be the third time in one year Samsung has ****ed up their wear leveller, their quality control is clearly crap in this regard.
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