[Q] Strange boot problems with SPH-L710

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shtinkypuppie

New member
Apr 2, 2014
3
0
Howdy,

I'm having a strange problem with my totally stock S3 with the latest android update. I found it dead in my pocket the other day. It was totally unresponsive to the power key.I tried about 5 different batteries to no avail. When I plug it into a car charger, it shows an empty battery with a frozen 'thinking' circle, then turns off. When I plug it into a Samsung wall charger, it does the same 'frozen thinking circle, ' then appears to charge the battery. While it's plugged in to the samsung charger, I can turn it on. It goes through the boot screens, but crashes during the Sprint splash screen. If I unplug the charger, it is completely unresponsive again. I COULD boot into recovery mode (with the samsung charger plugged in), and have tried wiping the cache. I don't want to factory recover it because the data on the phone is more important to me than the hardware. I can't get it to boot into safe mode.

Today I flashed the firmware with ODIN. ODIN says it was successful, but the phone still has exactly the same problem. If there's no way to fix it, is there any way to pull the data off?

Thanks in advance for any ideas.
Eric
 
Last edited:

Blue Penguin

Member
Oct 15, 2012
8
0
Las Vegas, NV
Recovering data from hosed phone

Since your data is so important to you, don't flash anything else until you do the following.

If you have data on a removable SD card, take it out! Get an SD card reader if you don't already have one and make a backup of the SD card contents on the PC. Also, leave the SD card out of the phone until you get it working. It could either be part of the problem or something else to get hosed.

See if you can use adb to get the data off while the phone is booted into recovery.

Make sure the phone has been on a charger for a couple of hours (data cable do charge, but slowly).

Using the latest supported ODIN for your phone, try flashing an Android 4.1 stock rooted rom (to avoid KNOX bootloader), and the newest Clockword Mod recovery and the newest modem. Boot the phone up (hopefully it works), update PRL and profile, don't update anything else, and then you can flash your preferred ROM. No flashing stock ROMs that are 4.2 or newer, risk of getting KNOX bootloader which you DON'T want.
 

shtinkypuppie

New member
Apr 2, 2014
3
0
Thanks for your reply. The SD card is out, but unfortunately most of the data I want is on the phone's internal storage. If I'm not already rooted, will ADB work at all? I don't suppose there's any way to remove the internal storage and graft it into a working phone, is there?
 

Blue Penguin

Member
Oct 15, 2012
8
0
Las Vegas, NV
Recovery mode adb

Thanks for your reply. The SD card is out, but unfortunately most of the data I want is on the phone's internal storage. If I'm not already rooted, will ADB work at all? I don't suppose there's any way to remove the internal storage and graft it into a working phone, is there?

Sorry for the delay, been busy.

adb while in recovery should give you root even if you haven't rooted your ROM. I just tested it with CWM. I am rooted, but I didn't have to su like I do when I am using adb while running the ROM. Recovery mode you are started off as root. /data isn't accessible until your use the menu option to mount it (don't be under /data when you do it). adb pull your files and then cd out of /data, select umount and then you are done recovering data.