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Damo366

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May 25, 2013
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First time poster, not very long lurker.

I have a Samsung Galaxy S3 GT-I9300T from Vodafone in Australia. I rooted the phone around 2 months ago using Odin. The phone worked perfectly.

Up until two days ago, my phone ran out of battery, as soon as I got home I started it up and it would not get passed the first splash with the Galaxy logo.

I was able to get into recovery and cleared the cache. No luck.
I made a Nandroid Backup as soon as I rooted the phone and tried to recover. No luck.
Tried to format and factory reset. No luck.

Feeling desperate, I tried downloading and installing the original firmware. Had some luck, the phone booted up and showed the home screen. But the phone says there is no Sim card, and will not connect to WiFi.

I can re-root the phone and recover my Nandroid backup, but I'll be back in the first square.

Can anyone give me some light on my issue?
 
Damo366 said:
First time poster, not very long lurker.

I have a Samsung Galaxy S3 GT-I9300T from Vodafone in Australia. I rooted the phone around 2 months ago using Odin. The phone worked perfectly.

Up until two days ago, my phone ran out of battery, as soon as I got home I started it up and it would not get passed the first splash with the Galaxy logo.

I was able to get into recovery and cleared the cache. No luck.
I made a Nandroid Backup as soon as I rooted the phone and tried to recover. No luck.
Tried to format and factory reset. No luck.

Feeling desperate, I tried downloading and installing the original firmware. Had some luck, the phone booted up and showed the home screen. But the phone says there is no Sim card, and will not connect to WiFi.

I can re-root the phone and recover my Nandroid backup, but I'll be back in the first square.

Can anyone give me some light on my issue?
Click to expand...

Welcome to the forums!

The only thing I can think of, and I am guessing here, is when you flashed the original ROM, the modem that came with it wasn't the correct one. That may explain why your phone is saying no sim, and can't connect to wifi. Now, I know kernels and modems can be flashed to devices, but I have little experience in this. I am not even sure this will fix the problem. It may make it worse. You could flash an appropriate carrier custom ROM to your device like CyanogenMod. That will ensure proper flashing of all files, modems, kernels, etc. But, again, it still may not work. However, since you are without a cell at the moment, you may not have much choice.
 
Last edited:
Golfdriver97 said:
Welcome to the forums!

The only thing I can think of, and I am guessing here, is when you flashed the original ROM, the modem that came with it wasn't the correct one. That may explain why your phone is saying no sim, and can't connect to wifi. Now, I know kernels and modems can be flashed to devices, but I have little experience in this. I am not even sure this will fix the problem. It may make it worse. You could flash an appropriate carrier custom ROM to your device like CyanogenMod. That will ensure proper flashing of all files, modems, kernels, etc. But, again, it still may not work. However, since you are without a cell at the moment, you may not have much choice.
Click to expand...

Epic quick reply and thank you for the welcoming.

I know little about custom roms as I never put one on my phone. Any insight on how I would look into that?

I'm still open to other suggestions as the thought of flashing more stuff seems quite daunting.
 
Damo366 said:
Epic quick reply and thank you for the welcoming.

I know little about custom roms as I never put one on my phone. Any insight on how I would look into that?

I'm still open to other suggestions as the thought of flashing more stuff seems quite daunting.
Click to expand...

I would then try to find correct stock roms to flash througg recovery or ODIN.

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Android Central Forums
 
If you haven't tried a battery pull you should certainly do that.

When you say that you flashed the original firmware, do you mean the generic i9300 firmware, or the Vodafone-specific flavor?
Have you checked the information to make sure your IMEI, MEID, etc haven't gotten jacked up (assuming that you recorded that information when you first got it)?
You may just need to get a replacement SIM and reactivate the phone to solve the SIM problem; not sure offhand about the WiFi issue - have you checked the radios to make sure they're current? Probably need more specifics about that issue.

Sent from my rooted, debloated, deodexed Sinclair ZX-80 running CM -0.001 using Tapatalk 2
 
GSDer said:
If you haven't tried a battery pull you should certainly do that.

When you say that you flashed the original firmware, do you mean the generic i9300 firmware, or the Vodafone-specific flavor?
Have you checked the information to make sure your IMEI, MEID, etc haven't gotten jacked up (assuming that you recorded that information when you first got it)?
You may just need to get a replacement SIM and reactivate the phone to solve the SIM problem; not sure offhand about the WiFi issue - have you checked the radios to make sure they're current? Probably need more specifics about that issue.

Sent from my rooted, debloated, deodexed Sinclair ZX-80 running CM -0.001 using Tapatalk 2
Click to expand...

No idea what a battery pull is. I'll look into it.

The firmware I installed was original for my phone. I also did an emergency recovery with Kies using my model and S/N number. That option has put me into a bootloop. I can see the first Galaxy S3 screen, then a Vodafone splash, then the next "Samsung" loading splash, but when the phone should load it goes back to the Vodafone splash ;_;

Any insight into that?
 
A battery pull is simply shutting the phone completely off; removing the back cover and pulling the battery out for a couple of minutes; putting it all back together and powering it up again.

After this latest Kies Emergency Recovery, did you boot into Recovery, wipe Dalvik & cache (and another Factory Reset for good measure)? Assuming that you got the correct firmware, that should take care of a bootloop.

Sent from my rooted, debloated, deodexed Sinclair ZX-80 running CM -0.001 using Tapatalk 2
 
GSDer said:
A battery pull is simply shutting the phone completely off; removing the back cover and pulling the battery out for a couple of minutes; putting it all back together and powering it up again.

After this latest Kies Emergency Recovery, did you boot into Recovery, wipe Dalvik & cache (and another Factory Reset for good measure)? Assuming that you got the correct firmware, that should take care of a bootloop.

Sent from my rooted, debloated, deodexed Sinclair ZX-80 running CM -0.001 using Tapatalk 2
Click to expand...

Yeah I have pulled the battery a fair few times. I just tried your idea and tried deleting the cache and factory resetting. While I was doing that, it came up with "E:failed to mount /efs (Invalid argument)".

I have no idea what this means and will begin my search of Google.

Any other suggestions?

EDIT: Also, doing the emergency firmware with Kies has put the correct and latest OFW on the phone. It's as if it is not rooted yet so I can't wipe Dalvik. Should I re-root and try again?
 
I wouldn't mess with rooting yet - let's just try to get the phone back to a workable state.

If you have an SDCard installed, go ahead and power off and remove that.

Do you get that "efs" error every time it tries to boot? Sounds like some part of the filesystem got corrupted. You may have to reload that firmware again if this continues to happen. If you do, wipe the cache first, then load the firmware, then see what happens and keep us posted.

Sent from my rooted, debloated, deodexed Sinclair ZX-80 running CM -0.001 using Tapatalk 2
 
Okay, after many hours of searching, I have figured out that the problem lies with my IMEI.

I have managed to get to the main menu, and I can also type in "*#06#" into the phone, but my IMEI appears as "Null/Null"

I have re-rooted the phone and checked the "/efs" folder, but it appears there is no IMEI folder in that folder. I have tried to do the 9 step restore, but I can't seem to mount the /efs into EFS PROFESSIONAL.

Any help would be great.
 
Sorry, your problem is now beyond my level of knowledge. You may want to try posting in the rooting sub-forum for your carrier, or over on XDA where all of the experts live.
If you do get some useful information it would be great if you follow up here so that the rest of us can learn something.

Sent from my rooted, debloated, deodexed Sinclair ZX-80 running CM -0.001 using Tapatalk 2
 
That's beyond my knowledge, too. Flashing a complete new ROM in Odin might fix it, but I don't know for sure. Might be time to talk to your carrier and see if they can reload the IMEI.

Damo366 said:
Okay, after many hours of searching, I have figured out that the problem lies with my IMEI.

I have managed to get to the main menu, and I can also type in "*#06#" into the phone, but my IMEI appears as "Null/Null"

I have re-rooted the phone and checked the "/efs" folder, but it appears there is no IMEI folder in that folder. I have tried to do the 9 step restore, but I can't seem to mount the /efs into EFS PROFESSIONAL.

Any help would be great.
Click to expand...
 
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