Good Morning Guys
After a lot of struggle I decided to post me and my friends problem here, I know on XDA Developers there are a lot of clever guys who might help us to solve this problem. Please note that I have a Galaxy S3 which is rooted and loaded with Custom ROM WanamLite Rom, so I am familiar with the process on how to do this and we have tried all options to fix the OS on this Galaxy S4 i9505 of my friend. Here are the details:
We are from South Africa and when overseas my friend bought a Galaxy S4 i9505 in Bangkok, he had the option between the clone and an Original, so he bought the ORIGINAL rather than the clone. Now once he got back to SA he started using the phone which wasn't network locked but we noticed that the OS version was a bit funny and that the phone was already rooted out of the BOX (Strange) so we thought he bought a clone and followed all the links on the the net showing how to determine weather its a clone or not. So we came to the solution that his phone is NOT a clone but it has a weird OS on it that we cant change/load another OS on. Here is what we tried:
1) We wanted to load a new OS or Custom ROM since the phone was already rooted, so we first tried to download the stock firmware from SAMMOBILE for South Africa and copied it to the Ext SDcard and rebooted the phone in Recovery mode. There we didn't have any option to install OS/ZIP from Ext SDcard ..... Not even under advanced. There is NO Mounts & Storage nothing, it just doesn't display any External Storage options. So this made us go to step 2
2) We thought okay lets try at least and load another custom ROM since its already rooted and see if we can fix the problem the other way around. So we installed Odin on PC and connected phone in download mode to install CWM recovery, ODIN pics up the device as "Unknown" and the port in ODIN doesn't become green. We have installed/uninstalled various S4 USB Drivers and when the phone is connected to Windows 7 PC is shows Unknown Device ...... You can access the phone Sdcard & ExtSDcard through Windows although its shows Unknown Device, but when rebooting in recovery mode it doesnt see the Ext SDcard - WTF?
This is where we gave up and decided to see if any of you guys can help or have any ideas to fix this and get a proper OS working on it ...... Cause I suspect that whatever OS is on the phone wont even receive OS updates and we want to be able to update the OS/Custom ROM for new OS versions like Android v5 thats on the way. Help would be appreciated guys
Take care
After a lot of struggle I decided to post me and my friends problem here, I know on XDA Developers there are a lot of clever guys who might help us to solve this problem. Please note that I have a Galaxy S3 which is rooted and loaded with Custom ROM WanamLite Rom, so I am familiar with the process on how to do this and we have tried all options to fix the OS on this Galaxy S4 i9505 of my friend. Here are the details:
We are from South Africa and when overseas my friend bought a Galaxy S4 i9505 in Bangkok, he had the option between the clone and an Original, so he bought the ORIGINAL rather than the clone. Now once he got back to SA he started using the phone which wasn't network locked but we noticed that the OS version was a bit funny and that the phone was already rooted out of the BOX (Strange) so we thought he bought a clone and followed all the links on the the net showing how to determine weather its a clone or not. So we came to the solution that his phone is NOT a clone but it has a weird OS on it that we cant change/load another OS on. Here is what we tried:
1) We wanted to load a new OS or Custom ROM since the phone was already rooted, so we first tried to download the stock firmware from SAMMOBILE for South Africa and copied it to the Ext SDcard and rebooted the phone in Recovery mode. There we didn't have any option to install OS/ZIP from Ext SDcard ..... Not even under advanced. There is NO Mounts & Storage nothing, it just doesn't display any External Storage options. So this made us go to step 2
2) We thought okay lets try at least and load another custom ROM since its already rooted and see if we can fix the problem the other way around. So we installed Odin on PC and connected phone in download mode to install CWM recovery, ODIN pics up the device as "Unknown" and the port in ODIN doesn't become green. We have installed/uninstalled various S4 USB Drivers and when the phone is connected to Windows 7 PC is shows Unknown Device ...... You can access the phone Sdcard & ExtSDcard through Windows although its shows Unknown Device, but when rebooting in recovery mode it doesnt see the Ext SDcard - WTF?
This is where we gave up and decided to see if any of you guys can help or have any ideas to fix this and get a proper OS working on it ...... Cause I suspect that whatever OS is on the phone wont even receive OS updates and we want to be able to update the OS/Custom ROM for new OS versions like Android v5 thats on the way. Help would be appreciated guys
Take care
