Rabbit Hunting: What caused this S3 to randomly restart and hang? What could have been done?

JonB55198

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Sometime last week, my Verizon Galaxy S3 restarted randomly. It did this when I plugged it into my laptop's USB port for a slow charge. I have done this everyday for the last 4 months with not problems. But on this day, it restarted, passed thru the first two splash screens, and hung on the "Verizon 4G LTE" splash screen. I wasn't able to get it to restart properly ever again without a factory reset, thus losing some un-backedup data. I would like to present to you the facts of what I tried so that I could learn what could have been done. Here is the order of what I tried.

Sutff I tried:
1. taking battery out, waiting restarting. I tried this many times to no avail.
2. taking out battery and SIM, waiting restarting. tried several times.
3. inserting a coworker's battery, keeping my SIM card.
4. inserting coworker's SIM, my battery.
5. inserting both coworker's battery and my SIM.
6. clearing cache. I only tried this once. But I later read that someone got their phone to reboot after repeating the cache clear procedure 3x. I'm not sure why repetition would be effective since the phone gave me the message that the cache had been successfully cleared.

After trying all that stuff above, I called Verizon tech support and they instructed me to factory reset. Now, here is the weird part: I got the message from the phone that the factory reset was successful. But, upon rebooting, it hung again in the exact same place. I went back to my desk fearing this would be a hardware issue. I plugged the phone into the wall charger so that I could have a full battery for the tech's at the verizon store. A few minutes later I decided to give it another shot and BOOM, it booted properly.

Unanswered questions:
1. What caused this? Was there some update pushed to my phone that caused the crash?
2. Why did plugging it in seem to fix it? Could I have just plugged it in without doing factory reset and saved the heartache of losing my data?
3. would repeating the cache clearing procedure have done anything?
4. what else could have been done in this situation to recover the data before the factory reset? I don't really mind resetting, just losing data stinks..

Thanks for your help. I hope someone else gains knowledge from this so that they do not have to go through what I did.
 

Golfdriver97

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Sometime last week, my Verizon Galaxy S3 restarted randomly. It did this when I plugged it into my laptop's USB port for a slow charge. I have done this everyday for the last 4 months with not problems. But on this day, it restarted, passed thru the first two splash screens, and hung on the "Verizon 4G LTE" splash screen. I wasn't able to get it to restart properly ever again without a factory reset, thus losing some un-backedup data. I would like to present to you the facts of what I tried so that I could learn what could have been done. Here is the order of what I tried.

Sutff I tried:
1. taking battery out, waiting restarting. I tried this many times to no avail.
2. taking out battery and SIM, waiting restarting. tried several times.
3. inserting a coworker's battery, keeping my SIM card.
4. inserting coworker's SIM, my battery.
5. inserting both coworker's battery and my SIM.
6. clearing cache. I only tried this once. But I later read that someone got their phone to reboot after repeating the cache clear procedure 3x. I'm not sure why repetition would be effective since the phone gave me the message that the cache had been successfully cleared.

After trying all that stuff above, I called Verizon tech support and they instructed me to factory reset. Now, here is the weird part: I got the message from the phone that the factory reset was successful. But, upon rebooting, it hung again in the exact same place. I went back to my desk fearing this would be a hardware issue. I plugged the phone into the wall charger so that I could have a full battery for the tech's at the verizon store. A few minutes later I decided to give it another shot and BOOM, it booted properly.

Unanswered questions:
1. What caused this? Was there some update pushed to my phone that caused the crash?
2. Why did plugging it in seem to fix it? Could I have just plugged it in without doing factory reset and saved the heartache of losing my data?
3. would repeating the cache clearing procedure have done anything?
4. what else could have been done in this situation to recover the data before the factory reset? I don't really mind resetting, just losing data stinks..

Thanks for your help. I hope someone else gains knowledge from this so that they do not have to go through what I did.

Welcome to the forums.

Counter question: Did you reboot into recovery to clear the cache (Power, volume up, and home)?

I will try to answer your questions.
1. Unknown. Unfortunately, almost anything software could cause a bootloop. Doubtful it was an update.
2. I honestly think plugging it in was coincidence. I may be wrong, but I have yet to hear of just plugging it in to clear a boot loop. As for trying it the next time, it can't hurt.
3. I don't know why repetitious cache clearing would have any effect over a single, but it is still a computer, and computers can be picky...
4. In the exact situation...nothing can be done. However, you can have loss kept to a minimum by doing a back up once a week or so, depending on how much sensitive data you accrue.

-For instance, you do a back up once a week on say Saturday morning, every week. Any random day after, you have lost at worst 6 days of data loss. If you phone starts to get full from memory, you simply plug into your PC and pull the files, and store them on your PC or better yet, there and a back up hard drive. Utilizing a Cloud Service wouldn't be a bad idea as well. Then, if say a fire happens in your home, and the hard drive is destroyed, you have an alternative back up.
 

GSDer

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You didn't mention if you have an SD card - if you do, removing that would be a good test option.

Attempting to boot into Safe mode would be worth a shot - if it just continues the bootloop behavior you haven't lost anything but a few minutes; if it boots successfully and runs normally then you have an opportunity to make a backup before anything else happens.

You may want to consider using the Kies software on your PC to completely reload the stock firmware.

Sent from my rooted, debloated, deodexed Sinclair ZX-80 running CM 10.2 using Tapatalk 4
 

JonB55198

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You didn't mention if you have an SD card - if you do, removing that would be a good test option.

Attempting to boot into Safe mode would be worth a shot

Thanks for your reply. At the time I wasn't using an SD card. Also, I forgot to mention that I did try safe mode and for some reason, it wouldn't boot into safe mode. I tried that several times and couldn't get it to get out of the boot loop. But that's a good idea for others to follow should they have this same problem.
 

JonB55198

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The more I think about it, it quite possibly was caused due to an update or combination of updates. After the phone was factory reset, it suddenly had all this additional facebook and texting functionality that it didn't before. So a new version of FB was pushed down at the very least.
 

GSDer

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The more I think about it, it quite possibly was caused due to an update or combination of updates.
The last update (4.1.2, MF1) for Verizon was months ago.
With that said, performing a Factory Reset after an OTA can change the behavior of the device, so it's possible that's what's going on.

Sent from my rooted, debloated, deodexed Sinclair ZX-80 running CM 10.2 using Tapatalk 4
 

JonB55198

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More Information: So basically 1 week later the phone boot looped again. I had it replaced under warranty. I'm guessing, but will never know definitively, that this was all caused by a hardware failure of some type. I'm thinking that when I did a factory reset to the phone and it didn't boot the first time, this was indicative of a hardware problem. The fact that it booted again later on in the day was luck/coincidence/random. In conclusion, had I been more persistent with trying to boot it normally before a factory reset, I would have eventually been successful, then being "scared straight" I would have immediately backed up all the files. The same boot loop problem would have arisen a week later just as it did, but my files would have been backed up.
 

GSDer

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Thanks for the follow-up.

Did you get a refurb or a new replacement?

You may want to consider:
Cloud Drive: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.amazon.clouddrive.photos (automatically backup your pictures/videos to the cloud; 5GB free)

Dumpster: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.baloota.dumpster (like the Recycle bin on Windows-based computers; allows you to recover a file that you accidentally deleted)

Helium: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.koushikdutta.backup (allows you to backup your apps and app data; SMS [but not MMS] and call logs)

You should also consider using the Kies software on your PC to backup your contacts, SMS/MMS (the only way I've found to backup/restore MMS), call logs, pictures/videos, and TouchWiz settings (most of them anyway).

Sent from my rooted, debloated, deodexed Sinclair ZX-80 running CM 10.2 using Tapatalk 4
 

JonB55198

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GSDer: thanks for the tips on those apps. I had probably 4GB of pics when the phone went down. So, basically Cloud Drive would have done the trick.

Verizon gave me a refurb S3. But, GUESS WHAT? 4 days later, I returned to my desk from a meeting to find the phone boot looping, sitting on the Verizon 4G LTE splash screen just as the previous unit had done.

What could be causing this? Verizon thinks it has something to do with my gmail account. I think it could be something to do with the SIM or battery.
 

GSDer

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Easy enough to eliminate the SIM card as a potential problem...

No SD card installed?

I find it unlikely that your Gmail account could be causing the problem, but it's easy enough to eliminate that factor too, particularly if this is happening frequently - just remove the Google account for awhile (you can still make phone calls).

It could be the battery - they're cheap enough to check it out Samsung Galaxy S3 SIII Li-ion battery (84% OFF) http://drippler.com/updates/share/samsung-galaxy-s3-siii-li-ion-battery-84 Via j.mp/drippler_app

Given that you got a refurbished phone, though, I think that's a much more likely reason for your problem.

Sent from my rooted, debloated, deodexed Sinclair ZX-80 running CM 10.2 using Tapatalk 4
 

JonB55198

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I also thought the gmail account was an unlikely cause. Right now I'm operating the phone without a gmail account. But, it could be a week or a month before this phone decides to do this again. It is seemingly random. On the old device, it was a week between 1st and 2nd occurance. On the refurbished replacement device it was 4 days before it occurred.