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Do technicians know I flashed firmware? [Warranty]

Hi. I bought a Chinese Android tablet and wifi stoped working 1 day after. No way to get it back working. Also tried Data restore from settings and from recovery, but same thing. Contacted them to notify, they provided assistance but nothing helpful, and proposed me to send it back.
So, I found the firmware tool and the firmare here in xda thread. I went to flash it (following User Manual by the way), and at 70% or so, it showed an error and the tablet won't boot anymore, just show the first Welcome screen. Recovery key combination will now get a black screen and the Windows' firmware tool just detects it sometimes but just a second, so won't flash.
My question is, if I send it back, will technicians know a firmware has been flashed or actually semi-flashed? Or since I got problems since first moment and I talked to them twice about it, they will understand it just worked worse each time I turned it on? (which actually is what had been happening until I flashed. Website/company FAQ tells flashing any firmware will void site's warranty (pretty big company). I've been redirected to there too late...
Thanks

[Q] GT-N7100 animates SAMSUNG indefinitely

HOW IT STARTED
Yesterday I noticed that my phone was off. I connected the charger and found that it was still half full. I turned the phone on and it worked normally. After an hour I noticed that my phone was off again. I tried turning it on but it only reached the SAMSUNG animation and animated it indefinitely.
A month ago or so I received a notification in the notification bar about refreshment of security policies. Since my phone was rooted, I did not want to apply them because I was afraid that it would kick Knox back in. Then a couple of weeks ago I received a new notification about a new software update from Samsung. At first, I did not want to install that one either. But a couple of days ago I thought what the heck, let's try it and agreed to install it. I left it to install in the background and forgot about it.
WHAT I DID
First I rebooted into recovery (TWRP) and did all wipes. While doing them, TWRP complained that some of them could not me completed. I rebooted and saw that this wiping did not have any effect on the issue.
Then I rebooted back into recovery and did wiping again. This time I noticed that when I ordered a reboot from TWRP, it confirmed me if I was sure because there was no OS installed. I found that weird but had no choice but to reboot and naturally nothing had changed: it still animated SAMSUNG indefinitely.
What else is particular is that the samsung theme melody is cut of in the middle of the animation. When I hear it being cut of I already know: that boot attempt will never end.
Then I downloaded and flashed the latest stock firmware from Sammobile with ODIN. All was well in ODIN but when the phone rebooted, I once again had the opportunity to watch the word SAMSUNG indefinitely.
Then I tried downloading and installing the latest Kies 2 into fresh Windows 8.1 virtual machine and tried the Firmware Upgrade and Initialisation option. It asked for model and serial number and then downloaded something but then said that "This device's version cannot be updated". I then tried Kies 3 but that said that I had the wrong Kies.
WHERE I AM NOW
I tried flashing downloaded n7100_odin_efs.tar with ODIN, knowing that it would erase/overwrite my /efs partition which contains nv_data file with my IMEI code but since /efs could not be mounted anyway, there was nothing to lose. After flashing this file I successfully booted into fresh TouchWiz and saw the information in the attached screenshot.
I checked the IMEI by dialing *#06# and it was "004999010640000 / 01". I don't have a backup of nv_data and I have broken the warranty by flashing custom roms on it. How would I get my nv_data file regenerated with the correct IMEI (without purchasing special hardware or paying some guy with such a box)?
I tried a program called WRITEIMEI which should allow me to write back the correct IMEI but when I tried to read or write with this program, it only displayed "Verifying" indefinitely.
Current problems:
- Unable to fix IMEI from generic to back to what it's supposed to be (to get mobile network access back)
- Unable to get rid of this technical information banner (see the attached screenshot)
- Wifi is always off after reboot

hennot said:
HOW IT STARTED
Yesterday I noticed that my phone was off. I connected the charger and found that it was still half full. I turned the phone on and it worked normally. After an hour I noticed that my phone was off again. I tried turning it on but it only reached the SAMSUNG animation and animated it indefinitely.
A month ago or so I received a notification in the notification bar about refreshment of security policies. Since my phone was rooted, I did not want to apply them because I was afraid that it would kick Knox back in. Then a couple of weeks ago I received a new notification about a new software update from Samsung. At first, I did not want to install that one either. But a couple of days ago I thought what the heck, let's try it and agreed to install it. I left it to install in the background and forgot about it.
WHAT I DID
First I rebooted into recovery (TWRP) and did all wipes. While doing them, TWRP complained that some of them could not me completed. I rebooted and saw that this wiping did not have any effect on the issue.
Then I rebooted back into recovery and did wiping again. This time I noticed that when I ordered a reboot from TWRP, it confirmed me if I was sure because there was no OS installed. I found that weird but had no choice but to reboot and naturally nothing had changed: it still animated SAMSUNG indefinitely.
What else is particular is that the samsung theme melody is cut of in the middle of the animation. When I hear it being cut of I already know: that boot attempt will never end.
Then I downloaded and flashed the latest stock firmware from Sammobile with ODIN. All was well in ODIN but when the phone rebooted, I once again had the opportunity to watch the word SAMSUNG indefinitely.
Then I tried downloading and installing the latest Kies 2 into fresh Windows 8.1 virtual machine and tried the Firmware Upgrade and Initialisation option. It asked for model and serial number and then downloaded something but then said that "This device's version cannot be updated". I then tried Kies 3 but that said that I had the wrong Kies.
WHERE I AM NOW
I tried flashing downloaded n7100_odin_efs.tar with ODIN, knowing that it would erase/overwrite my /efs partition which contains nv_data file with my IMEI code but since /efs could not be mounted anyway, there was nothing to lose. After flashing this file I successfully booted into fresh TouchWiz and saw the information in the attached screenshot.
I checked the IMEI by dialing *#06# and it was "004999010640000 / 01". I don't have a backup of nv_data and I have broken the warranty by flashing custom roms on it. How would I get my nv_data file regenerated with the correct IMEI (without purchasing special hardware or paying some guy with such a box)?
I tried a program called WRITEIMEI which should allow me to write back the correct IMEI but when I tried to read or write with this program, it only displayed "Verifying" indefinitely.
Current problems:
- Unable to fix IMEI from generic to back to what it's supposed to be (to get mobile network access back)
- Unable to get rid of this technical information banner (see the attached screenshot)
- Wifi is always off after reboot
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
To be honest, if I were you I'll just flash a .pit file to erase everything off the phone (and to erase any errors). After doing so, flash a stock ROM (before 4.3) or a custom ROM, preferably a AOSP ROM. This (might) solve your IMEI issue. (It did for me anyways) (The information banner looks like something from factory mode or something like that, not exactly sure.)
N7105 rocking AOSB with AGNi kernel,
Click "Thanks" if I was of any help!

The issue was resolved by taking the phone to a mobile phone repair service which took €35 and returned the device with a functional IMEI.

Note II LTE stuck on bootloader

Hi,
This morning I woke up to see my phone seemingly booting up but after a few minutes I realised that it was stuck on the boot screen. I can only assume something hardware or software related messed up while I was sleeping and now after reading a few threads I am very scared that my phone could possibly be bricked.
First up, I updated to 4.3 from 4.1.2 about 3 weeks and it has been running fine albeit a few annoyances at the new firmware Samsung deployed. To get root I had to install philz_touch_5.11.2 recovery through ODIN and then go into my new recovery to install root through Dr Ketan's Multi Tool which seemed to work well with no problems, it was quite flawless through the whole update. But now I guess something has happened to my phone and that has changed. When I saw it was stuck, I thought that it would be possible to just reflash to stock firmware and that would fix it. It was working up until the point ODIN got "cache.img" which failed the install. Now, I exited ODIN since it didn't work and restarted my phone and tried to flash the stock 4.3 ROM again. This time, immediately I got a screen telling me that there was "no PIT partition"
(Look at the attachment for the screen, I am new so no outside links)
and now I am getting the message on my phone after restarting "Firmware upgrade encountered an issue. Please select recovery mode in Kies & try again." I am now downloading Kies to try this but does anyone have any suggestions or solutions?

GoonReb0rn said:
Hi,
This morning I woke up to see my phone seemingly booting up but after a few minutes I realised that it was stuck on the boot screen. I can only assume something hardware or software related messed up while I was sleeping and now after reading a few threads I am very scared that my phone could possibly be bricked.
First up, I updated to 4.3 from 4.1.2 about 3 weeks and it has been running fine albeit a few annoyances at the new firmware Samsung deployed. To get root I had to install philz_touch_5.11.2 recovery through ODIN and then go into my new recovery to install root through Dr Ketan's Multi Tool which seemed to work well with no problems, it was quite flawless through the whole update. But now I guess something has happened to my phone and that has changed. When I saw it was stuck, I thought that it would be possible to just reflash to stock firmware and that would fix it. It was working up until the point ODIN got "cache.img" which failed the install. Now, I exited ODIN since it didn't work and restarted my phone and tried to flash the stock 4.3 ROM again. This time, immediately I got a screen telling me that there was "no PIT partition"
(Look at the attachment for the screen, I am new so no outside links)
and now I am getting the message on my phone after restarting "Firmware upgrade encountered an issue. Please select recovery mode in Kies & try again." I am now downloading Kies to try this but does anyone have any suggestions or solutions?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Update: I spent the past two days trying to solve this and I'm at a standstill in progress. It seems that my phone was one that suffered SDS with a corrupt eMMC chip so I've lost both my firmware and recovery but I can still get into Download mode. It also seems like I have lost my PIT table and I am just completely unable to flash the PIT file back to the phone for some reason. Does anyone have any ideas on how I could just factory reset my phone or reinstall my partition table so that i can get a simple recovery installed? Please help

Exact same issue!
I know exactly what you are going through!
My phone did the exact same thing back in June. It downloaded the firmware update over wifi, then when it went to install, it restarted to the boot logo, and went no further. I had left it for a number of hours, so time doesn't seem to make any difference.
I've been working on it since the end of July, and haven't been able to find a solution yet.

dkinniburgh said:
I know exactly what you are going through!
My phone did the exact same thing back in June. It downloaded the firmware update over wifi, then when it went to install, it restarted to the boot logo, and went no further. I had left it for a number of hours, so time doesn't seem to make any difference.
I've been working on it since the end of July, and haven't been able to find a solution yet.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah, it doesn't seem like time would fix it, so frustrating. Right now I am getting the glass of my Note replaced (it has a slight crack) which apparently voids my warranty when I went into my carrier to organise a replacement. After it's repaired I will take it to another store and try to get it sent off to Samsung, hopefully they are understanding about it and will honour their warranty end as I do believe it was SDS so it would be their fault for using faulty eMMC chips. The only thing I wish I could do it just start over, flash the PIT file so I can just install CWM to see if any of my files are still there. I just want some peace of mind and it seems impossible at this point. I guess it is impossible to flash a PIT when the storage chip is corrupt, sucks to lose all my messages and data, just wish I had a backup in place but it is a good learning experience for the next time I have a functioning phone.

GoonReb0rn said:
Yeah, it doesn't seem like time would fix it, so frustrating. Right now I am getting the glass of my Note replaced (it has a slight crack) which apparently voids my warranty when I went into my carrier to organise a replacement. After it's repaired I will take it to another store and try to get it sent off to Samsung, hopefully they are understanding about it and will honour their warranty end as I do believe it was SDS so it would be their fault for using faulty eMMC chips. The only thing I wish I could do it just start over, flash the PIT file so I can just install CWM to see if any of my files are still there. I just want some peace of mind and it seems impossible at this point. I guess it is impossible to flash a PIT when the storage chip is corrupt, sucks to lose all my messages and data, just wish I had a backup in place but it is a good learning experience for the next time I have a functioning phone.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I was lucky having most of my info already backed up. I also had just upgraded another line, so I had a new phone to work with. It just sucks having to switch everything over to a new phone, reloading all the apps etc.

Bootloop without solution? happened suddenly

Hi everyone.
I have been reading a few posts about bootloops in hopes that someone would have been facing the same issue as me. It seems my case is a bit different. I am desperate for some help!
My Max 3 came initially with a chinese ROM but I followed some wonderful tutorials here and I unlocked it and installed initially the xiaomi.eu ROM. Then a couple of months later I installed AOSiP ROM, I updated it a couple of times dirty flashing over it, and settled in exactly the "AOSiP-9.0-Pizza-nitrogen-20190719" build. And there i was, for 4 months, all stable, then suddenly today I was going to unlock the phone with my fingerprint and asked for password.
This happens exactly 1 time per day but I noticed that today it was the second time. Then doesn't matter how many times I put my password correctly, it would keep asking for my password. So I decided to restart the device... and then the bootloop issue started. It starts, reaches the moment in which the AOSiP logo shows and (not even 1 second until the logo shows) freezes, and restarts the device.
I can access the recovery without issues so I didn't panic yet, I backed up all I could, wiped everything I could, started from zero: firmware 9.9.3 + AOSiP-9.0-Pizza-nitrogen-20191117 + gapps. The bootloop still there, in exactly the same way. So at this point I have no clue what could be the reason. I was always careful not to trigger any anti-rollback, it was all going good, now not even with a full factory reset seems to work. I even reinstalled the recovery.
Any ideas? does anyone know what could I try next? Thank you very much advance.

I forgot to attach some logs. I got using the TWRP Advanced > Copy Log option.

Well, I guess I completely screwed it now. I had the brilliant idea to go back to some of the original steps I did way back and flashed an old xiaomi.eu ROM "xiaomi.eu_multi_MIMAX3_8.8.9_v10-8.1", that completely bricked the phone. Screen doesn't even turn on anymore. Is it the end for my Max 3?

diegoocampo said:
Well, I guess I completely screwed it now. I had the brilliant idea to go back to some of the original steps I did way back and flashed an old xiaomi.eu ROM "xiaomi.eu_multi_MIMAX3_8.8.9_v10-8.1", that completely bricked the phone. Screen doesn't even turn on anymore. Is it the end for my Max 3?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The mi max 3 has arb enabled, so flashing old rom can cause it to brick.

Have you tried different button combinations to enter fastboot? If you can get to fastboot, just flash a fastboot rom, if that works.
If the brick is caused by triggering ARB, then that may cause some issues, and may need an Authorized Account to flash the ROM from scratch, with some qualcomm flashing tools things.
Though, there may be some way to bypass the authorization for mi max 3 on the internet and have your device unbricked.

Thank you for your replies. Yes probably ARB, I thought my phone had never installed a ROM with ARB and so I was safe to install xiaomi.eu_multi_MIMAX3_8.8.9_v10-8.1 (which it is also to be pre-ARB), but I guess I made a mistake at some point.
Situation now:
- with Mi Flash I am getting the authorization error with almost any ROM, with very old ROMs I am not even able to start the flashing process
- with Qualcomm QFIL tool I always get an error "function: sahara_rx_data:237 Unable to read packet header. Only read 0 bytes". And I also tried with the patched files from here https://forum.xda-developers.com/redmi-note-5-pro/how-to/fix-arb-bricked-device-qfil-t3841780
I think at this point I tried everything that can be tried. My bootloader was unlocked, but at this point I am not even sure if its unlocked anymore since I can't see anything on the device screen.
The only positive thing is that the phone always shows under the Windows 10 device manager "Qualcomm HS-USB QDLoader 9008", so at least is a bit alive, and with the Mi Flash at least for some ROMs starts the flash process. I am not sure if disassembling it and trying things like removing the batter would make any difference.
If anyone knows any other way to bypass authorization please let me know.

Here I am back with another update:
- I fixed the full brick by disassembling the phone and disconnecting the battery, with the battery disconnected I could finally flash a Chinese ROM. That however was just the beginning... more problems came
- Common problem I guess is that after booting with that Chinese ROM i was getting a message about how the encryption was interrupted. This was easy, just changed the file system of Data and formatted it and it was fixed.
- Now I am stuck in another hard to solve problem. Any ROM that boots will not allow me to use WiFi or SIM cards. And the reason is that the IMEI is not set anymore. Reading about it I see that this is related with the EFS partition being corrupted. Nothing seems to work now. I don't have any EFS backup . Anyone knows how to fix the IMEI in this case?

HELP PLEASE.Is there a way to flash or root AT&T Note 5,stuck in boot loop mode???

HELP PLEASE.Is there a way to flash or root AT&T Note 5,stuck in boot loop mode???
Hi to all
I'm member on XDA for a long time,but I really am a newbie considering rooting,flashing and messing with the phones.
Yesterday ,my At&t Samsung galaxy NOTE 5 restarted by itself and started doing that constantly.Maybe because the memory was almost full so the firmware didn't have enough space to run correctly ,I don't really know.
So I decided to do a FACTORY RESET in order to refresh the phone.I backed all up (it did restart few time while I did that but I managed to finish it).
After I did the factory reset and wiped the cache,I rebooted the phone and that is when the boot loop started.
Once or three times came back and started the phone up to the first settings (I managed to put in my google username e.t.c. but after a minute maybe it freezes and restarted by itself again)
I tried again another factory reset but the boot loop continues.I tried many time to turn it off,it restarted up to INSTALLING UPDATE......then tried to turn it off completely (Volume down+Power+Home button) and somehow I managed to turn it off.
I thought that I can come here and find the instructions on how to FLASH it with ODIN,but I couldn't find the stock firmware for AT&t Note 5.
Then I remembered (and read on internet) that the bootloader on AT&T phones is locked !!!!!
I searched some threads here for at least how to root it ,but I can't find anything clearly.
So I'm asking you for help: IS THERE ANY SAFE WAY THAT I CAN DO FLASH OR ROOT MY AT&T SAMSUNG NOTE 5 (EXPLAINED STEP BY STEP) IN ORDER TO MAKE MY PHONE WORK AGAIN????
I have never before messed with the phone.It has the original stock firmware Android 7.0 Nougat.
And the phone is bought in USA,but I live in EUROPE and have unlocked it ,by buying some code online, few years ago.It was working fine until yesterday.
Thank you in advance guys I hope that someone might help me.
Juno 106

Guys I found here some older version (few months older) of Android 7 for my Note 5 and I managed to do a flash. The flashing went OK I went through settings and after few minutes the phone freezes again and restarts. And then again the same,it works fine for a few minutes,freezes and restarts (I can here the camera working inside sometimes too)...........CAN ANYONE HELP ME REPAIR MY PHONE ,PLEASE ???

Hi again
I don't know why no one is replying to me???
Today I managed to make the settings and power up the phone,restored the back up....the phone is working,BUT the PROBLEM is that it constantly freezes and reboots by itself.Sometimes it works for few minutes and reboots,sometimes it works for 30min and then it reboots,sometimes longer...
What might be the problem? Is it some hardware problem processor ,memory or maybe bad battery? It is older model and I have noticed with Accu Battery that most likely the battery haslowered it's capacity.It drains faster,sometimes when it comes to 15% it drains very fast...
Can anyone help me diagnose the problem?
Thank you in advance

Try booting into Download Mode & flash a new stock firmware if all else fails, assuming u tried a factory reset first with no satisfaction. Guides are everywhere. I HTH

PiMPSoFT said:
Try booting into Download Mode & flash a new stock firmware if all else fails, assuming u tried a factory reset first with no satisfaction. Guides are everywhere. I HTH
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thank you for your reply
I managed to flash the firmware few times,but the phone keeps freezing after some time and restarts.Sometimes it is stuck in the bootloop,sometimes it starts up to some point,freezes and restarts.
Could it be BAD BATTERY or is it something else?
If it is the battery problem,I will replace it,but I'm afraid that it might be someting else wrong.
What is your opinion?