[Q] Had my GN died?

Same thing just happened to me, thi is the second time

lighthammerhh said:

I was updating some apps in the market, as suddenly the phone reboots without any warnings.
OK, **** happens i thought and let it boot. But now the phone starts the ROMs boot animation for about 4-5 seconds and then reboots over and over again.
I pulled the battery and started into recovery. I made a nandroid and wiped cache and dalvik. Reboot with same behavior.
Recovery again: wiped everything and flashed a new AOKP M3 - result: reboot and loop again
Back to recovery: tried to flash the before made nandroid - MD5 checksum error
Flashed an older nandroid and got boot loops again.
So, i think this piece is for the service now...

What is the best way to reset this GN? Using ToolKit to put back stock recovery and lock the bootloader? Or should i try something else?

Update:
Flashed Stock Google Image via ToolKit 5.4 and after that the phone is booting normal?!?
I reflashed the touch recovery and pushed the AOKP build 27 back to the phone and flashed it.
So far so good - I have to start from the bottom now, because flashing the stock rom wiped the whole phone and EVERYTHING on sdcard is gone
Do you think there is a hardware failure? Perhaps some sort of memory malfunktion or something like that?

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Firstly when you get bootloops or any other problem do NOT do a nandroid as it backs up EVERYTHING, including the problem.
When you "wiped everything" did you go to mounts and storage and format system, cache and data?
If not then you didn't do a proper full wipe.

This is my own experience, but I want to warn you guys. I had a similar problem with my GNex. The first time it happened, my phone rebooted itself every 5 seconds. I completely restored it using factory image and it ran fine for 3 weeks, then one day, the phone just rebooted itself and got stuck at the boot image. I had to factory reset it again to make it work.

After the second time, I called Samsung and sent it in for repair last week. They are shipping me a replacement unit. It seems the problem was hardware related.

econometrician said:

This is my own experience, but I want to warn you guys. I had a similar problem with my GNex. The first time it happened, my phone rebooted itself every 5 seconds. I completely restored it using factory image and it ran fine for 3 weeks, then one day, the phone just rebooted itself and got stuck at the boot image. I had to factory reset it again to make it work.

After the second time, I called Samsung and sent it in for repair last week. They are shipping me a replacement unit. It seems the problem was hardware related.

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For 3 weeks... exactly 3 weeks, 21 days?

I can tell you that my first boot loop brick was 20 days after I bought the phone. The second was later that day. But the third one was... again, 20 days after the last successful restore. Is there something magical about the 3-week mark???

I am currently taking nightly nandroid backups, so when I had my third boot loop brick my backup was just under a day old. If this is ultimately a hardware problem that can be warrantied, I guess I'll have to try that next time. I would have to make sure I return it with the bootloader locked, stock recovery, but without the wipe because it has to still be boot looping to prove there's an issue!

Anyway, things I will point out:
- It's the complete wipe in bootloader that blanks the internal storage.
- If you have CWM installed, you can back up the internal storage over USB via adb pull /sdcard/ ./sdcard/ (correct me if I got the syntax wrong)
- When the boot loop brick has happened, CWM is not capable of properly reformatting or restoring to the data partition. I have not found a way to repair it without blanking /sdcard (which on the GN is actually in /data/media), so if you don't want to lose those files the only way to keep them is to pipe them out, blank the phone, and then pipe them back in afterwards.
- After a complete wipe in bootloader (either by flashing userdata.img or by relocking/unlocking bootloader), you must boot the phone once into the OS in order to complete the reformatting of /data. If you try booting straight into recovery after a wipe in the bootloader, CWM cannot read or write from that partition.

Can't say for sure whether it's exactly 21 days but it's definitely around 3 weeks. Why don't u give Samsung a call? The phone is not supposed to behave this way. Plenty of people don't have this problem. My wild guess is that the internal flash memory is faulty.

econometrician said:

Can't say for sure whether it's exactly 21 days but it's definitely around 3 weeks. Why don't u give Samsung a call? The phone is not supposed to behave this way. Plenty of people don't have this problem. My wild guess is that the internal flash memory is faulty.

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I'll warranty it through my carrier next time as they do exchanges on site. The trouble is, once I've recovered the phone, there's no evidence of the problem anymore. The best way to prove it is to show it fritzing out.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk

I think this is a known problem. You shouldn't have to prove it to them. They should be aware of it.

It bricked again today so I warrantied it in-store at my carrier. They gave me a brand new one after being unable to find a solution when fiddling with it. As a bonus, all the little hairline scratches on my screen are gone too

The store guy said he's never seen this issue, and it's one of only two warranty locations for my carrier in the Vancouver area. So I can only hope this was a rare hardware problem and not something that pervades every GN they're going to sell.

I can tell this one is from a different batch because it came preloaded with 4.0.2.

Good for you. hopefully my new phone will behave