galaxy s3 international stuck in download or factory mode, help please guys

awob73

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Jan 2, 2015
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hi guys, first time poster, basicly my sons gs3 was updating itself ota the other day then turned off, it wouldnt reboot or switch on at all, no lights when plugged in or connected to the computer, tried a new battery and tried the pull the battery and still nothing, ive managed to get it into download mode using a usb jig, and when connecting it to the computer the pc starts loading drivers, so i think im right in thinking this can be recovered, it was bought second hand a couple of years ago so dont know what version of android was on it before it crashed, i think it was rooted with a custom rom, ive tried kies but it seems to hang on connecting, also i see people saying that when in download mode there phone says odin mode? mine says factory mode at the top
factory mode
product name gt-i9300
custom binary download yes 11 counts
current binary custom
system status custom
this is all i can get the phone to do using the jig, am i doing something wrong?
odin connects to it but fails when installing firmware as im not sure i got the right stock rom, not sure where to get the right one from.
 

Rukbat

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Feb 12, 2012
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The phone was probably running a custom ROM. The update should have aborted at the point it discovered that. (For a now-very-obvious reason - updating a custom ROM with a stock update can brick the phone.)

If, with the phone off, you press Volume Down, Home, then power, and hold all 3 of them down, does the phone start in download mode (or a warning and a choice of Volume up or down to restart normally or go into download mode)? If you can get to that point, you should be able to use Odin to flash a stock ROM. (SamMobile Firmwares has 4.3 ROMs for the i9300 for over 20 countries.) Actually, the jig should get you to the download mode too, so that says that the whole phone has been repartitioned in some strange way. (The original owner flashed 11 ROMs to it, so who knows what else he put into it?)

If you can't force at least one ROM into it (and the only way I know to do that at home is to get into download mode), look on eBay for JTAG, and find a JTAG service that can flash an i9300. (That just puts the ROM into the hardware, without worrying about whether you can get into download ode. Once that's done, if the hardware isn't damaged (which it probably wasn't just from a bad update, the phone will work.)

Another thing you could try (but that custom system status may make it impossible from a "human engineering" viewpoint) is to bring the phone to your carrier and, very politely, of course, take the attitude, "your update ruined my phone, so please either fix or replace it". It happened to one of mine - without any custom ROM or recovery - just a stock phone with an update that went bad - and the carrier apologized because they had to replace the phone.

(Don't get me started on how bad, and how ancient, Google's method of updating phones over the air is, but we did it better and safer before 1990. [Not OTA phone updates of course, but online computer firmware updates. Live. With no possibility that a bad update would cripple the device.])
 

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