Kies update not working

Hey everyone.

I'm running into a really annoying issue. I picked up the T-Mobile GS5 a couple weeks ago and rooted it shortly thereafter. That is the only mod I've done, but it obviously blocks OTA updates.

With the new (NE6) update stable, I want to upgrade, so am trying to use Kies. Unfortunately, I can't get it to work. Everytime I try, I get the "new firmware available" alert, but when I attempt to proceed, Kies just freezes. I've tried not using the auto-update and selecting "Firmware Upgrade" manually, but no difference.

I was originally trying on an XP virtual machine (VMWare Workstation under Linux), and thought maybe that was the issue so tried under a Windows 7 VM. Same issue. So I tried the Mac version of Kies on my MBP. This time, I got to the screen where you need to check off that you agree to the update terms, but when it begins to download, Kies loses connection to the phone and it eventually errors out. So I tried a Win7 bootcamp attempt, but same general Windows failure. So I tried a baremetal (on PC hardware) Windows 7 attempt, and I'm sitting here at a slightly grayed out Kies screen that is unresponsive. In each method above, I tried numerous times with reboots of the computer and phone.

I searched, but couldn't find any similar issues. Based on the number of attempts on different computer scenarios, I have to believe it's an issue with my phone, but outside of this it works great. I've tried disabling developer mode, rebooting numerous times (phone and computer), etc. etc.

Does anyone have any idea what could be wrong? I consider myself fairly adept at Android and have a lot of custom experience with Nexus devices, but am not super familiar with the intricacies of Samsung products.

I used the Odin root method, and see there are firmware packages to upgrade that way, but believe it would factory reset my device - correct?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

I read that sometimes having an external SD card can cause issues. Just tried removing that since I did have one installed. No difference.

koolboyztn said:

try right click and run it as administrator with Kies see it work or not, also download the NE6 firmware files from sammobile and use odin to flash it, it wont factory reset yr phone, only thing u will lose is root but it can re-root with same step u did before.

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Click to collapse

Thanks, I did try that too but no difference. For some reason, my phone seems to be incompatible with Kies.

After a lot of frustration, last night I did manually upgrade using Odin and the firmware files in the stock zip thread over in the dev section here. Initially, I only did the 'firmware' upgrade, since it seemed that the 'full' package would wipe the device (based on the comments in that thread), but that actually caused a lot of issues (fingerprint reader stopped working, etc.). So I was forced to use the full one, and it worked without wiping my device, which I'm quite happy about.

I did lose root, but for now I'm good. I mainly wanted it to restore from TiBu, but haven't needed root since, so I'll leave it stock and try the next OTA update.

I'm just more concerned about why Kies failed on 5 different machines (virtual or physical).