Phone not booting (Is it soft brick?)

Hei,

I was running 4.3.1 Dirty Unicorns and wanted to flash Smartdroid.
So, flashed Devil recovery and tried to flash the ROM.
It gave me message that there's an error in the zip file.
I was just playing with the options available in the recovery and selected some option, which I don't remember now.
After that, the went into bootloop. "Samsung Galaxy S3 I9300" appears on the screen and the phone reboots again and again.
This loop continued.
The phone could be put in Download mode.
Then, I flashed CWM 6.0.4.4 and flashed 4.1.2, which I downloaded some time back.
It went on well. I could boot the phone and had set it up.
However, I couldn't connect to network.
The IMEI was some default one.
Rooted the phone and tried to restore the backup of efs folder using HC-Ktool.
After restore, when I booted the phone, it didn't boot.
"Samsung Galaxy S3 I9300" appears on the screen and the phone reboots again and again.
I tried flashing the ROM again, CWM again etc etc.
Nothing worked.
In one occasion, after installing CWM 6.0.4.4, I restored from NANDROID backup. Restore was successful.
But, it wouldn't boot.
Same "Samsung Galaxy S3" appears on the screen and the phone reboots again and again.
Once, I flashed Dirty Unicorns ROM from zip via CWM. Still the same.

What is happening and how to solve it?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Babloo

Hei,

This worked!!!
Thanks.
Why flashing 4.1.2, Dirty Unicorns didn't work and this one worked?
If you can explain, that will be helpful to all.

Now, though the phone is booting, the efs folder is corrupted.
IMEI number is not what it should be.
I have a backup of the efs folder taken using HC-Ktool long back.
So, the ROM on which efs folder was backedup will be different that the ROM I have now. (Does it make any difference?)
Can I just root and restore that efs folder using HC-Ktool?

Thanks for the help!!

Regards,
Babloo

Edit:

If I flash CWM Recovery 6.0.4.4 and restore the NANDROID backup that I took before I started screwing my mobile, will everything be fine?

Hei,

"format the partition, restore your backup"
For this, can I just root the phone and use Ktool to restore backup?
If you suggest any other procedure, pls give me more info.


-Babloo

Hei,

After the previous post, I could restore my phone from NANDROID backup that I took yesterday, before the whole mess.

After that, I tried to restore the efs folder using HC-Ktool from efs.img.
It gives the message that restore is completed.
But, after reboot, the IMEI remains the same wrong one (the generic 004999...)
The size of efs.img is 20.48 MB.

I tried to restore using the terminal method.
With the command "unmount /efs" I get error message "sh: unmount: not found"

How can I restore the efs and get back my IMEI?

When I tried to "open" the img file in Windows, it couldn't open. It says that the file is corrupted.
Could it have been really corrupted or it is just that Windows is unable to open it?

I restored the efs using the same backup file.
Why is it not working now?

-Babloo

Hei,

boomboomer said:

You are trying to skip essential stages and hurry to finish, but your partition is still corrupt -you can't restore anything to a corrupt partition.

Search and read someone who has succeeded doing the same thing, follow their guide exactly.

Click to expand...

Click to collapse

I have been searching for a proper procedure to format the efs partition since your post.
Whatever I found didn't work for me.
Can you please point me to any post that you know?

-Babloo

Guys,

Any ideas?

-Babloo