Samsung Galaxy S7 Active bricked- bad screen or mobo?

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Android Central Question

Hi everyone,

I have an AT&T Samsung Galaxy S7 Active SM-G891A that just became unresponsive. It began with a vertical pink line appearing and disappearing intermittently down the right side of the screen. After a few times if this happening, the phone froze while playing "Laser Overload," which I had just downloaded, for about 30 minutes. I performed a soft reset and the phone went into a boot loop that lasted 20 minutes or so- sometime it would make it to the AT&T screen and freeze, sometimes it wouldn't make it past the "Samsung Galaxy S7 Active" screen.

Finally, it booted up normally but was running slowly. I powered it down, thinking it may have been overheated, and left it alone for a few hours. Upon starting it back up, it worked fine for about 15 minutes but then froze once again. I performed another soft reset, but this time the screen stayed black- no image and unresponsive to touch, but with the top left LED indicator a steady blue. It stayed like this for an hour or so until I plugged it in; the screen did show the lightning bolt charginf icon but it took about 10 minutes for it to display the battery percentage (0%). The phone had 75% battery when it became unresponsive.

Once it had charged to about 15%, I booted it up (leaving it plugged in) and again it became stuck in a boot loop. I rebooted to the system menu (Home + volume up + power) and cleared the system cache in hope that this would resolve the issue, but again the boot loop. Finally, I performed a factory restore on the phone from the boot menu. This time, the phone booted to the AT&T screen before it froze with a horizontal line of static near the bottom of the screen. I soft reset it and the phone made it through the boot screens to a Wi-Fi login. I logged in to the network and the phone froze again, this time shutting down completely and is unresponsive to being plugged in- multiple cables and chargers being used. There is no top-left LED light when plugged in, and attempting to power on the phone using any method does nothing.

Is it possible that playing a game for a half hour was the final straw in killing a graphics processor? I hadn't used this phone for any thing graphics intensive and this game seems rather simple (2D only, no simulated camera, etc.), but it's a secondhand phone that I've had for a few months now. The phone had been dropped a few days ago- only about 2ft onto a rubber mat with no damage to the phone. Could this have caused it?

Is there any way to verify what the issue could be with the phone unresponsive as it is? Any help would be appreciated.
 

Coach88

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Apr 2, 2014
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similar issue but nothing responding... just a battery with lightning bolt, percentage never goes up. home + volume up+ power doesnt do anything
 

Coach88

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Apr 2, 2014
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update... After Random persistent tries of various forms of reboot, home+Vol up+power button; Vol down + power button; power button by itself, safe mode reboot... all this time while the phone was plugged in but no percentage showing on the batt charging icon. Eventually it vibrated and saw that it was at approx 50% charge and it was going up. It then showed that it was in safe mode but nothing was responding... it was frozen. Then it shut down and rebooted again in regular mode. It stayed long enough that a back up was possible but when and update was attempted, it froze and stopped responding. It seems very random as if it freezes at various points in the boot up process and it will randomly snap out of it after random combos of reboot attempts. i wish i had better news or explanations...
 

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