For people that still have knox 0x0 (so no custom recovery) here are a few alternatives (of which one is also mentioned in some other places around, for instance
this thread):
- all images described here will also contain a backup of SOME (the 256MB image) or ALL (32GB image) of the information on your phone, including EFS and IMEI - so making at least the 256MB debrick image is a good idea even only for this backup!
- it is assumed that you are rooted and you have some form of busybox installed on the Note 3;
- also on the USB-based methods it is assumed that you have one PC where you have ADB and CYGWIN or similar (netcat for Windows might be enough) installed (and you have USB debugging enabled and approved that PC to use with adb on your Note 3; also certain paths are assumed to be active, if not just use the full pathname in the corresponding commands)
-
1 - simplest method, PC and one microSD needed, you connect the USB cable then do:
adb shell
su
then if you want to just SAVE the debrick image to microSD you do:
dd if=/dev/block/mmcblk0 count=524288 of=/storage/extSdCard/debrick.bin
or if you want to directly make the debrick microSD (which will NOT be seen as a microSD any more after this, and of course all previous content on the microSD will be lost)
dd if=/dev/block/mmcblk0 count=524288 of=/dev/block/mmcblk1
-
2 - if you do not want to use the PC you can even do the same commands above directly from the phone in Terminal Emulator - but typing will be a lot more complex
- on methods 1 and 2 you can also make a 32GB image (by omitting the count=524288 parameter) - as long as you have a microSD with 32GB or more free
-
3 - finally a method when you have no microSD (or no space on it, or you want to save the full 32GB image and do not want to wait twice) - connect your Note 3 over USB (somehow similar methods would also work over wireless connection, but slower; trying to use USB 3 will not be faster and will create huge problems since after 10 minutes USB 3 will be de-activated)
- on the PC create a port forward with something like
adb forward tcp:5555 tcp:5555
(you can check that it worked with adb forward --list)
- then still from PC start a shell over adb on the Note 3 and go superuser:
adb shell
su
- from that adb shell
IF YOU WANT A FULL (32 GB) BACKUP start this command on the Note 3:
nc -l -p 5555 -e dd if=/dev/block/mmcblk0
(this should start netcat on Note 3 and set it to wait for a connection, then when that is established send the content of the entire internal flash)
- from that adb shell
IF YOU WANT A MINIMAL 256 MB BACKUP start this command on the Note 3:
nc -l -p 5555 -e dd if=/dev/block/mmcblk0 count=524288
- still on the PC open a CYGWIN command prompt (elevated on Vista or newer) and from that one do:
nc 127.0.0.1 5555 > debrick.bin
that will open the connection and get the file sent from the Note 3 - this will take LONG (maybe over 2 hours on a 32 GB Note 3; OBVIOUSLY you need to have write permission and more than 32 GB free space).
The resulting debrick.bin will have like 112 extra bytes (or so) appended at the end (you can remove those with a program like
trunc but it is unlikely to ever be a problem if you do not).
If you want to store it in a safe place - 7zip will compress those pretty well (depending on how full the internal storage of your Note 3 is) - mine fits after compression on one DVD-R.
You can also write it onto a miniSD for debricking purposes - writing all of it does not make so much sense unless you have many 32 GB microSD cards that you never use; for the purpose of just debricking it is said that even a 2-4 GB microSD will be able to boot in download mode, even a 128-256 MB one will boot (but IMHO 128MB is too little and might trigger knox on an ultra-paranoid bootloader, so 256MB is the size that I recommend).
Also note that it seems that entire "debricking using microSD" works a little different on Qualcomm-based Samsung phones vs Exynos-based phones - so far all in this thread is about Qualcomm-based models, for Exynos-based models you will need to search on Google after an original Samsung document called
13-58_SM-N900_Boot_Recovery_Guide_rev1.0.pdf
,which describes how on Exynos you also need one extra (and pretty simple) hardware trick (the same seems to be also valid on other Exynos phones, there is a similar document on debricking the S3 i9300).
