[vanillas]

Hello everyone!
First of all I'm sorry if that's not the right section for this thread. As for my issue - a colleague of mine apparently locked his phone up and changed the language to Czech after doing a factory reset (??). He asked some other people from work to try and fix it and by the time I got my hands on it, they kind of bricked it by playing around with the debugging menu. Now I wanted to install fresh firmware on it using Odin, but I can't find any decent hosts to download an up-to-date ROM to throw at it, as most of them are either paid options that I'm not willing to go for just for a one time fix, and the others are just simply dead or extremely slow. I need to get the BTU region one, I managed to get one but it's Android 7.1.1 and it fails to proceed. Odin gives me Complete(Write) operation failed, and on the phone it says SW REV. CHECK FAIL(BOOTLOADER) DEVICE: 4 BINARY:2.
Now I've read that Samsung phones are picky and won't let you downgrade, so I need to get the lastest possible Android version which is 9 for this model, but I think 8 would work as well. Can anyone hook me up with a working link or a solution to this?

[hallux]

http://sammobile.com/firmwares is where I'd start...

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[Rukbat]

According to this page, the last ROM Samsung issued for the phone was 5.1.1. Are you sure the ROM you got was for the right phone? Or is GMArena wrong?

Oops - that's the A530F. Try https://www.sammobile.com/firmwares/galaxy-a8/SM-A530F/ - they have 9 for Vodaphone. It will probably work with other carriers, it just won't have their particular bloat.

This page seems to have the ROM also.

[vanillas]

Thank you for the reply, although I've already seen those sites. The issue is that the sites these roms are hosted on limit the file size that you can download for free to 2GB, UNLESS you go for the premium option and pay. I might as well try and flash it with stock, clean android that's not specific to this model if that's a possibility. Or maybe a custom ROM like cyanogen or whatever you would recommend? My guess is that at this point warranty won't cover it, and his carrier is gonna charge him more for the repair than I will, which I'm doing out of good will but he insists to pay me.

[Rukbat]

Cyanogen was bought and is no longer a free ROM, but LineageOS is (it's the successor to Cyanogen).