No cellular data after hard reset
I by no means have a brick, but I do now have an issue. Here’s what happened.
I have a Sprint ATIV S Neo, GDR3, Interop-unlock, the whole deal.
Installed the 8.1 update yesterday, and everything was working. I have been playing with all kinds of “stuff” in the registry and such, so I decided that since I had just installed 8.1 I would start fresh and do a hard reset. I don’t really care about keeping interop-unlock at this point. Even with it, so much is still locked down. I’m sure in the future someone will get this cracked and we can really have fun, but until then, just being developer unlocked is good enough.
So, when I got home I reset the phone (power+volume down, exclamation point, then the remaining sequence).
Phone boots back up, and I connect to my WiFi and set everything back up. I think life is wonderful at this point. Then decide to test my 4G download speed so I turn off wifi.
Oops, no cellular data, phone calls and text are fine (didn’t try mms, but probably doesn’t work, blank url in the provisioning). Tried all the usual tricks (##72786# and such). I have my msl, so I go into the provisioning, and things look messed up. My MDN and MSID are 000003872. That makes no sense, so I set them back to the correct values and still no go.
Called Sprint. They ran me through all the usual things that I had already done (hour on the phone with them).
Long story short: The activation program seems to be missing from my phone. Hands free activation never tries to start, in fact, after hard resetting again and watching closely, during setup it says “Activate your device can’t be opened”. And the network settings are missing from the settings menu.
So after work I’m going to take it to Sprint and hopefully they have a factory image they can flash (hopefully an older version so I can update things myself).
My thinking is that the 8.1 update is basically the new rom, but during install doesn't delete the existing carrier programs. When I hard reset, all that got re-installed was the strictly Microsoft stuff, not the carrier specific items i.e. hands free activation.
PS Sorry about the novel...