Hello, I managed to soft brick my phone while overseas and am writing this message at 2:00am in the morning (at least in this time zone) after two days of trying to fix it. Some background info--I'm usually based in the U.S., have a Samsung Galaxy S6 edge+ with service from T-mobile. Have never rooted or modified the phone in any way. I'm using a macbook pro laptop (running a windows virtual machine/vmware, on the mac) on this trip.
While on this current trip to Asia (currently in the Philippines) (much to my surprise it seems like the phone was getting 4G data here), I accidentally bumped the "yes" button on t-mobile's persistent OTA upgrade request box and the phone started a OTA upgrade, I assume to Android 6.0.1. I kept an eye on the phone as it went through various stages of progress in the upgrade. didn't see any error messages. It eventually restarted, got to the T-mobile screen, and got stuck there. That was two days ago. I've done quite a bit since that time to try to figure out what went wrong, searched all over online to find potential solutions. it goes without saying if there is any way possible i need to recover many important files on the device, so a reset is the option of last resort.
Long story short, seems like the farthest I can get on the phone is to Android Recovery mode, or the download screen. I installed the android tools and have "adb" working from the mac command line. Bad news is, it looks like I didn't have USB debugging mode activated on the phone, now I can't see any possible way to activate usb debug mode because the phone just won't boot past the t-mobile screen. I can get adb to detect the phone for a moment if I select "apply update from adb" on the recovery mode screen but that's about it, haven't been able to issue any other commands to the phone through adb other than detect and sideload.
tried to reload the android image...via command line adb sideload G928TUVU2DPD1 but get error messages about failure to verify (i think), anyways adb sideload wasn't happening. I installed Odin on my windows VM, attached the usb bridge from the mac to the windows vm and Odin was able to see the device. I was able to successfully push G928TUVU2DPD1 to the phone's download mode, both Odin and phone seemed happy about the file transfer, the phone went through a install process, restarted, with the exact same result as when the OTA update finished - phone stuck at the t-mobile screen after reboot.
I tried to load TWRP to the phone with hopes to run backups, and was actually able to transfer TWRP to the phone using Odin, yet TWRP wouldn't install -- the phone complained of the unauthorized binary. i guess the phone has to be rooted first or something else needs to be flashed to defeat the binary check, haven't tried that yet.
So I'm stuck with a soft bricked phone for now, yet instinct tells me with Odin working and talking to the phone, I should be able to install -something- that will get me back in business...that's why I'm posting this message, to ask for help as it seems like this group is the go to place for this type of specific info.
i am not at all familiar with custom android work yet have been active with tech stuff for the greater part of my life, plenty of coding and experience dating back years and have done dev work in most of the popular languages, very comfortable with command lines, log files and so forth...just never had a reason to mess around at a low level with my android phone until the past 48 hours, so i'm not really familiar. does anyone have any ideas? as a next step i'm thinking of trying to push a downgrade to the phone through Odin which I suppose would be Android 5.1.1 , although I haven't yet located binaries that feel exactly right for t-mobile and s6 edge+ ... sigh, this has been quite a time consuming way of learning the bricked phone recovery process..
:good:
thanks in advance for any ideas or help on this...it's quite disturbing to be on a business trip with no phone, and the past 6+ months worth of not backed up (gulp) data still sitting on the device (hopefully)..
here's some data from the Android Recovery screen:
6.0.1/MMB29K.G928TUVU2DPD1
samsung/zenltetmo/zenltetmo
was flipping through the recovery logs and i notice quite a few log entries about "couldn't find any tzdata when looking for localtime!" , I notice entries like "Starting recovery on Fri Jan 2 03:55:29 2015" -- i'm wondering if the phone is having trouble setting internal time and date which might be preventing it from booting...just a theory.
sorry for the long message, wanted to completely describe this fun scenario, just in case anyone has any ideas..thanks again
While on this current trip to Asia (currently in the Philippines) (much to my surprise it seems like the phone was getting 4G data here), I accidentally bumped the "yes" button on t-mobile's persistent OTA upgrade request box and the phone started a OTA upgrade, I assume to Android 6.0.1. I kept an eye on the phone as it went through various stages of progress in the upgrade. didn't see any error messages. It eventually restarted, got to the T-mobile screen, and got stuck there. That was two days ago. I've done quite a bit since that time to try to figure out what went wrong, searched all over online to find potential solutions. it goes without saying if there is any way possible i need to recover many important files on the device, so a reset is the option of last resort.
Long story short, seems like the farthest I can get on the phone is to Android Recovery mode, or the download screen. I installed the android tools and have "adb" working from the mac command line. Bad news is, it looks like I didn't have USB debugging mode activated on the phone, now I can't see any possible way to activate usb debug mode because the phone just won't boot past the t-mobile screen. I can get adb to detect the phone for a moment if I select "apply update from adb" on the recovery mode screen but that's about it, haven't been able to issue any other commands to the phone through adb other than detect and sideload.
tried to reload the android image...via command line adb sideload G928TUVU2DPD1 but get error messages about failure to verify (i think), anyways adb sideload wasn't happening. I installed Odin on my windows VM, attached the usb bridge from the mac to the windows vm and Odin was able to see the device. I was able to successfully push G928TUVU2DPD1 to the phone's download mode, both Odin and phone seemed happy about the file transfer, the phone went through a install process, restarted, with the exact same result as when the OTA update finished - phone stuck at the t-mobile screen after reboot.
I tried to load TWRP to the phone with hopes to run backups, and was actually able to transfer TWRP to the phone using Odin, yet TWRP wouldn't install -- the phone complained of the unauthorized binary. i guess the phone has to be rooted first or something else needs to be flashed to defeat the binary check, haven't tried that yet.
So I'm stuck with a soft bricked phone for now, yet instinct tells me with Odin working and talking to the phone, I should be able to install -something- that will get me back in business...that's why I'm posting this message, to ask for help as it seems like this group is the go to place for this type of specific info.
i am not at all familiar with custom android work yet have been active with tech stuff for the greater part of my life, plenty of coding and experience dating back years and have done dev work in most of the popular languages, very comfortable with command lines, log files and so forth...just never had a reason to mess around at a low level with my android phone until the past 48 hours, so i'm not really familiar. does anyone have any ideas? as a next step i'm thinking of trying to push a downgrade to the phone through Odin which I suppose would be Android 5.1.1 , although I haven't yet located binaries that feel exactly right for t-mobile and s6 edge+ ... sigh, this has been quite a time consuming way of learning the bricked phone recovery process..
:good:
thanks in advance for any ideas or help on this...it's quite disturbing to be on a business trip with no phone, and the past 6+ months worth of not backed up (gulp) data still sitting on the device (hopefully)..
here's some data from the Android Recovery screen:
6.0.1/MMB29K.G928TUVU2DPD1
samsung/zenltetmo/zenltetmo
was flipping through the recovery logs and i notice quite a few log entries about "couldn't find any tzdata when looking for localtime!" , I notice entries like "Starting recovery on Fri Jan 2 03:55:29 2015" -- i'm wondering if the phone is having trouble setting internal time and date which might be preventing it from booting...just a theory.
sorry for the long message, wanted to completely describe this fun scenario, just in case anyone has any ideas..thanks again
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