Hard brick after factory reset

[bellington74]

Folks,

It seems over on XDA there is quite the discussion about stock phones hitting the eMMC hard brick bug on the new UCLE5 firmware when performing a factory reset. This seems to be affecting any I777 running UCLE5, rooted or not. I have finally started seeing the decrease in battery life, screen lag and overall poor performance a lot of other users are seeing with the ICS update. I want to perform a factory reset per several recommendations on these forums, but I can't risk a hard brick, as this is my work phone. It has never been rooted or had the bootloader unlocked, totally stock. Has anyone else seen this issue, and if so, have you had any issues with getting any kind of support? Sammy is usually better than this, I can't believe they would allow an update to go out with such a potentially lethal bug in it.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I777 using Android Central Forums

 

[bellington74]

Bump

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I777 using Android Central Forums

 

[bellington74]

Confirmed.....

I got to the point that I could no longer use the phone because of all the issues post ICS that were piling up. I got on the phone with Samsung support and they recommended I factory reset. I asked them, are you not aware of the kernel bug causing hard bricks when doing this? Samsung's response: "There is no bug that can brick a phone in the latest kernel release, you will be just fine." The system was so hosed I could not factory reset via the GUI and had to go into recovery to do it. As the rep walked me thru it step-by-step (even though I knew how) we got the system wiped clean. When I rebooted..... brick. No boot up animation, just an error message quickly flashed on the screen and then blank. The Samsung rep was speechless. They are shipping me a new phone that has ICS pre-installed, not updated on top of GB. What a nightmare this update has been.

 

[Lawrence of a Labia]

That really sucks. I'm sorry to hear that happened. But, I do thank you for taking one for the team. At least one more Samsung rep knows about it now. Though, whether or not they'll actually do something about it is another story.

 

[bellington74]

Since it was under warranty, and I have a backup phone in my Atrix, I don't really mind taking one for the team if it keeps someone else from making the same mistake. From reading around on various forums, it seems to be hit or miss, and there is no rhyme or reason as to why its happening. Rooted, un-rooted, doesn't matter. Some people are getting bricked and some aren't. Its an obvious issue, and the fact that Samsung and AT&T are blinding themselves to this floors me... well that Samsung is anyway, AT&T is notorious for crap like this.

With that being said, Samsung amazed me, this all happened last night around 3:30PM CDT, and as I walked out the door this morning Fed-Ex pulled up with my replacement phone. The rep said 2 - 3 days so this was a surprise. It shipped with ICS already installed, and while I have not even started putting my apps and such back on, I can tell you that it seems to be more responsive and snappy than my previous one. I will give it a few days of hard use once I get it set back up and see if there are any differences.

It would not surprise me if there were, as in my experience with major updates on top of previous updates has been similar. When they bumped the Atrix 4G from Froyo to GB, I expected great things as GB was dual-core capable, and the phone SUCKED. It wasn't until I bricked it trying to unlock the bootloader and got a warranty replacement that came with GB pre-installed that I saw an amazing difference.

Anyway, I digress. I will update in a few days after I have put it through the paces as to whether its better.

 

[Entrical]

IMHO, root/flash to a custom ROM like CM9, ShoStock, AOSP, whatever floats your boat. They're much more stable, and none of the bloatware. I've only ever used CM9 as I've had nothing but good experiences with it, that and I don't want to lose my 'Vega' notification tone