Sprint S3 Not Working With 5.0+ Lollipop Roms, Works Fine With 4.4.4

[Papa Z]

All I want..... Is an S3 with AICP on Sprint's network.

Two weeks ago I bought an S3 for $50, started playing with it, easily flashed AICP and TWRP 2.8.7.0 Recovery. Everything was awesome, until Sprint couldn't activate it. I flashed back to stock through Odin, Sprint still couldn't activate it (problems with programming). There was no Sprint boot screen, so assuming that was the main problem I found "SPH-L710_ND8_Full Restore_UNROOTED.exe" that restored the Sprint boot logo and viola! I had Sprint 4GLTE and talk and text.......... But now, this little devil S3 won't flash Roms that are 5.0 or newer. I have tried AICP, PAC-ROM, Vanir, Exodus.... all just boot to the boot logo and stay there, but when i try Gummy 4.4.4 it boots and works fine.

I always wipe cache, dalvik, & use correct gapps. Using TWRP 2.8.7.0 and have tried two other recoveries with same result. Tried flashing L710VPUDNJ2_L710SPRDNJ2_L710VPUDNJ2_HOME.tar.md5 through Odin and then reflashing recovery and retrying ROM, same result.

Right now its working fine with gummy 4.4.4 but I want 5.1-6.0 because that's the only way I will feel ok about having an S3 I'm sure I'm forgetting some details as this has been a two week off and on thing trying to get this phone to work, so if I am please forgive me and have pity (I'm using a blackberry Q10)

Why will lollipop roms not boot?!?!?!


Please..... help me obi wan kenobi...... you're my only hope

 

[RootSuperSU]

All I want..... Is an S3 with AICP on Sprint's network.

Two weeks ago I bought an S3 for $50, started playing with it, easily flashed AICP and TWRP 2.8.7.0 Recovery. Everything was awesome, until Sprint couldn't activate it. I flashed back to stock through Odin, Sprint still couldn't activate it (problems with programming). There was no Sprint boot screen, so assuming that was the main problem I found "SPH-L710_ND8_Full Restore_UNROOTED.exe" that restored the Sprint boot logo and viola! I had Sprint 4GLTE and talk and text.......... But now, this little devil S3 won't flash Roms that are 5.0 or newer. I have tried AICP, PAC-ROM, Vanir, Exodus.... all just boot to the boot logo and stay there, but when i try Gummy 4.4.4 it boots and works fine.

I always wipe cache, dalvik, & use correct gapps. Using TWRP 2.8.7.0 and have tried two other recoveries with same result. Tried flashing L710VPUDNJ2_L710SPRDNJ2_L710VPUDNJ2_HOME.tar.md5 through Odin and then reflashing recovery and retrying ROM, same result.

Right now its working fine with gummy 4.4.4 but I want 5.1-6.0 because that's the only way I will feel ok about having an S3 I'm sure I'm forgetting some details as this has been a two week off and on thing trying to get this phone to work, so if I am please forgive me and have pity (I'm using a blackberry Q10)

Why will lollipop roms not boot?!?!?!


Please..... help me obi wan kenobi...... you're my only hope

If you the original Sprint S3 and not the new Sprint Triband S3 then you should not have any problem at all! How long are you waiting on it to boot? I had the new Triband model and I had and I thought the lollipop roms wouldn't boot either but I had to give it 5-10mins sometimes on the 1st boot!

 

[Papa Z]

If you the original Sprint S3 and not the new Sprint Triband S3 then you should not have any problem at all! How long are you waiting on it to boot? I had the new Triband model and I had and I thought the lollipop roms wouldn't boot either but I had to give it 5-10mins sometimes on the 1st boot!

I have let it sit overnight a few times now.... just to make sure. With the Gumy 4.4.4 Rom it only took about 2 minutes which I was shocked by.

I feel like I have literally tried everything.

 

[RootSuperSU]

I have let it sit overnight a few times now.... just to make sure. With the Gumy 4.4.4 Rom it only took about 2 minutes which I was shocked by.

I feel like I have literally tried everything.

Yea Kitkat roms don't take very long on 1st boot anymore. But as for lollipop what all roms have you tried flashing?
There's only 2 reasons I can think of that they might not be working. 1st is your model SPH-710T or SPH-710 and 2nd are trying to flash a custom kernel with it?

 

[Papa Z]

Another thing I feel like is worth mentioning.... When I first flashed the AICP Rom I played with it for a few days so i had all my stuff installed. Realized I had to flash to stock to activate on Sprint so i made a Nandroid backup of my AICP 5.1 setup. When i restore this backup it boot loops as well.
Tried restoring everything except data, wiped dalvik and cache, all using the same twrp recovery. So strange...

 

[Papa Z]

Yea Kitkat roms don't take very long on 1st boot anymore. But as for lollipop what all roms have you tried flashing?
There's only 2 reasons I can think of that they might not be working. 1st is your model SPH-710T or SPH-710 and 2nd are trying to flash a custom kernel with it?

I have tried AICP, PAC-ROM, Vanir, Exodus.... all just boot to the boot logo and stay there. Mine is the SPH-L710 not the triband 710T. The Roms I tried to install, as far as I know, come with the kernel in the ROM zip. I have tried AICP and the pac-rom with just the rom zip and gapps, as well as with a few custom kernels just to see if it would change anything.

 

[Papa Z]

Ah another thing, may be unrelated because I only get this when flashing AICP and Pac, it says "unmount of /system failed; no such volume" and then flashes boot img and seems to be successful.

When I flashed exodus and Vanir it does not say this, and all seems to go perfect..... buuuuuut still boot loops/gets stuck at boot animation

Even tried flashing rom and gapps via adb sideload

 

[Papa Z]

I have a bad esn l710 in really poor condition. Just flashed the same recovery, same AICP rom, same gapps, all from the same SD card, and this one is working fine. Boots up in just a few minutes.

So i have to be missing something or something is wrong with the one I can actually activate.

EDIT: So "unmount of /system failed; no such volume" error doesn't matter, same thing happened on the bad ESN device that booted up fine.

 

[Papa Z]

Update (if anyone cares lol): I flashed both devices completely to stock with the "SPH-L710_ND8_Full Restore_UNROOTED.exe" and then did the exact same thing to both devices, twrp>aicp rom>gapps>dalvik>boot, the bad ESN crap device boots AICP fine, the good condition good ESN one boot loops forever.

I am at a loss here, both devices are exactly the same SPH-L710, flashed to stock completely, but the one with a good ESN that would actually work will not boot lollipop roms. I disassembled both devices to look for hardware differences of any kind, they're identical (with no signs of damage). The only difference is the bad esn one is a slightly deeper shade of blue. I'm pulling my hair out.

I even tried using the force, but my midichlorian levels have never been that good.
Who knows man

 

[madbat99]

I've seen this only a couple times. One guy had luck. When it was stuck, he just kept randomly hitting the power button and eventually long pressed until it was about to reboot (screen freezes for a second) and when it shut off, held home and volume up so it booted recovery when it came on. Then just rebooted system, and this time it booted. Also, sometimes when going back and forth between KitKat and lollipop, you need to wipe internal storage. Make sure you have the latest twrp too (2.8.7.0).
Just shots in the dark, but you never know.
I saw one member who was never able to boot lollipop roms, you would be the second. So its pretty rare.

 

[nexusdread13]

Well you now know 3 people that cant flash lollipop roms on an l710 NON tri-band.... Ive tried all of them including a couple of Vanir 6.0 roms and the ONLY one i could get to take was a BeanStalk 5.01 rom and a Candykat only after flashing its KitKat predecessor... All KitKat roms work just fine.. Curious,, as I also used the same odin non- rooted rom to get back to stock and after that had trouble flashing lollipop roms period.. Maybe something with the symlinks in that un-rooted rom??? I'm at a loss myself...

 

[Papa Z]

I've seen this only a couple times. One guy had luck. When it was stuck, he just kept randomly hitting the power button and eventually long pressed until it was about to reboot (screen freezes for a second) and when it shut off, held home and volume up so it booted recovery when it came on. Then just rebooted system, and this time it booted. Also, sometimes when going back and forth between KitKat and lollipop, you need to wipe internal storage. Make sure you have the latest twrp too (2.8.7.0).
Just shots in the dark, but you never know.
I saw one member who was never able to boot lollipop roms, you would be the second. So its pretty rare.

As the only possible solution I have not tried, I will attempt to randomly press/long press the home button as it boots and then boot recovery..... lol

What's even weirder is it worked fine with AICP lollipop just about a month ago, before i had done anything to it. but I repeated all the things i did to it on another s3 and that one still worked fine with lollipop roms.

 

[Papa Z]

Well you now know 3 people that cant flash lollipop roms on an l710 NON tri-band.... Ive tried all of them including a couple of Vanir 6.0 roms and the ONLY one i could get to take was a BeanStalk 5.01 rom and a Candykat only after flashing its KitKat predecessor... All KitKat roms work just fine.. Curious,, as I also used the same odin non- rooted rom to get back to stock and after that had trouble flashing lollipop roms period.. Maybe something with the symlinks in that un-rooted rom??? I'm at a loss myself...

I used that same unroooted Odin rom on a bad esn s3 and it works fine with lollipop roms. So strange

Edit: no idea what symlinks are

 

[DavidovDI]

I have similar probl.
After 4 months with CM12.1 I'm flashing NJ2 and upd. to OH1.
After THAT - I cant to flash anything ROM lollipop and higher.
I dont know, what is it.
I was waiting for 4 hours, 8 hours, 12 hours, a day!

I dont know, I dislike TW roms, help anyone!

 

[meatfest1974]

CyanogenMod 13.0 D2SPR

...I dunno, wanna start from scratch?

http://forum.xda-developers.com/galaxy-s3-sprint/development/rom-d2spr-cyanogenmod-13-0-t3248561
- Use the Sprint-made TWRP .img in the OP with Flashify (from the Play Store)
- Flash a CM 13, add GApps (from OpenGApps), and a recent SuperSU.

I'm a bit of a half-no0b, so I may be talking out me pants.
Bonne chance!

 

[Papa Z]

I have similar probl.
After 4 months with CM12.1 I'm flashing NJ2 and upd. to OH1.
After THAT - I cant to flash anything ROM lollipop and higher.
I dont know, what is it.
I was waiting for 4 hours, 8 hours, 12 hours, a day!

I dont know, I dislike TW roms, help anyone!

I'm glad I'm not the only one. Someone has to know how to fix this.... somewhere.

 

[DavidovDI]

I'm glad I'm not the only one. Someone has to know how to fix this.... somewhere.

Yep!:crying::crying::crying:

 

[HouseHG]

I had the same problem. Try this. It worked for me today.

I have a d2spr (originally from sprint). It is now activated with boost. L710VPUDOH1 bootloader and baseband. CF-Auto-Root-d2spr-d2spr-sphl710.tar.md5 flashed with odin for root. twrp-2.8.7.0-d2spr.img.tar.md5 flashed with odin as recovery. I backed up Apn's with "APN Backup & Restore" app. I wiped system, cache, dalvik, data. Flashed cm-12.1-20151117-SNAPSHOT-YOG7DAO1K7-d2spr.zip... . Flashed pa_gapps-modular-full-5.1-20150315-signed.zip. I Wiped Dalvik. The device booted smoothly within approximately 7 minutes. I had full function as far as I could tell. Everything worked well. Ran this setup for about a month. I decided to restore a stock w/root backup made with twrp2870. Bootlooped until I learned to wipe internal sd when going back to 4.4.2. I wiped the internal sd and successfully booted stock w/root backup. When I tried to go back to cm 12.1 backup, I ran into the same problem... boot loop for hours. Multiple times. Backups and different nightly zips. I found and flashed every custom recovery I could find for this device to try to make it work. Eventually... while I had twrp-2.8.7.2-d2spr.img as my recovery (not sure if it makes a difference or not). I found this...

(apparently the link is not allowed due to my lack of posts with this forum)
im pasting from another page at this point...

Ha! Got it! Visited the #cyanogenmod channel on freenode irc and there were some VERY helpful people there. So I've got a few instructions.
Flash the latest TWRP recovery via ODIN. (2.8.7.0-d2spr at the time of writing).
Flash your CM 12 zip file
On your PC (with adb installed) run the command "adb shell dd if=/dev/block/platform/msm_sdcc.1/by-name/persist of=/sdcard/persist.img"
Then run "adb pull /sdcard/persist.img" (This will give you a backup of the persist partition in case anything goes wrong)
Run the command "mke2fs -t ext4 /dev/block/platform/msm_sdcc.1/by-name/persist"
Run the command "adb reboot"
If it boots into OS, great! Reboot into recovery and install the lastest gapps package.

I did it from adb in a Cygwin64 Terminal. The device booted my cm12.1 backup the first time I tried. I think it would work just as well with adb from a windows command prompt. I only found this on another page. Credit goes to someone from "#cyanogenmod channel on freenode irc". Hope it is as much help to all of you as it was to me.

 

[Papa Z]

I have a d2spr (originally from sprint). It is now activated with boost. L710VPUDOH1 bootloader and baseband. CF-Auto-Root-d2spr-d2spr-sphl710.tar.md5 flashed with odin for root. twrp-2.8.7.0-d2spr.img.tar.md5 flashed with odin as recovery. I backed up Apn's with "APN Backup & Restore" app. I wiped system, cache, dalvik, data. Flashed cm-12.1-20151117-SNAPSHOT-YOG7DAO1K7-d2spr.zip... . Flashed pa_gapps-modular-full-5.1-20150315-signed.zip. I Wiped Dalvik. The device booted smoothly within approximately 7 minutes. I had full function as far as I could tell. Everything worked well. Ran this setup for about a month. I decided to restore a stock w/root backup made with twrp2870. Bootlooped until I learned to wipe internal sd when going back to 4.4.2. I wiped the internal sd and successfully booted stock w/root backup. When I tried to go back to cm 12.1 backup, I ran into the same problem... boot loop for hours. Multiple times. Backups and different nightly zips. I found and flashed every custom recovery I could find for this device to try to make it work. Eventually... while I had twrp-2.8.7.2-d2spr.img as my recovery (not sure if it makes a difference or not). I found this...

(apparently the link is not allowed due to my lack of posts with this forum)
im pasting from another page at this point...

Ha! Got it! Visited the #cyanogenmod channel on freenode irc and there were some VERY helpful people there. So I've got a few instructions.
Flash the latest TWRP recovery via ODIN. (2.8.7.0-d2spr at the time of writing).
Flash your CM 12 zip file
On your PC (with adb installed) run the command "adb shell dd if=/dev/block/platform/msm_sdcc.1/by-name/persist of=/sdcard/persist.img"
Then run "adb pull /sdcard/persist.img" (This will give you a backup of the persist partition in case anything goes wrong)
Run the command "mke2fs -t ext4 /dev/block/platform/msm_sdcc.1/by-name/persist"
Run the command "adb reboot"
If it boots into OS, great! Reboot into recovery and install the lastest gapps package.

I did it from adb in a Cygwin64 Terminal. The device booted my cm12.1 backup the first time I tried. I think it would work just as well with adb from a windows command prompt. I only found this on another page. Credit goes to someone from "#cyanogenmod channel on freenode irc". Hope it is as much help to all of you as it was to me.

I flashed mine back to stock and sold it.... got a good deal on an S5 and flashed MOAR to it.

I found this thread a while back and attempted to do what it says to do, but I couldn't get it to work for me. What exactly does running those commands do that suddenly makes it work?

 

[h4704226017]

I think it either reformats or converts the persist partition to ext4. I'm not 100% sure yet bc I haven't had time to look into it.

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