Help Official Jellybean bricked my phone (O2 UK)

[robdy2k]

Hi

As I alluded to in the JB O2 UK go post earlier, this came out yesterday OTA from Kies.

I upgraded using a cable and followed the golden rule of a factory reset and wipe of internal and external storage. My phone wasn't rooted and I kept it this way for my warranty which has about a month left.

Update went fine, signed in on my phone and downloaded about 40 apps, worked well for about two hours. Before bed last night I powered off to put my high capacity battery in (official Samsung) and after a reboot NOTHING.

The device stayed at the opening SGSII Splash screen and refused to get any further. Could not power off, only way to reset was by a battery removal.

Tried removing SIM and Micro SD card, no joy.

Only sniff of a root cause was my Evernote app which on signing in gave an error about not being able to write the databse and my sound recorder App which also would not write to local storage and had to be pointed at the SD card?

Unless anyone has any bright ideas before lunch time my phone will be going to the O2 shop to be looked at by their engineers under the last month or so of it's warranty.

Bit of a bummer but no data loss at least. Hope no one else experiences this disappointment after waiting so long for new firmware.

Cheers

Rob

 

[robdy2k]

Just checked and the phone WILL go into Andriod Recovery thing using Home/Vol up/Power but not sure if this is any use?

 

[robdy2k]

Tried the phone reset option which took me to the NEXT Samsung logo which looked promising then it just reset and took me back to the original logo which is essentially back at square one where it now resides static.

 

[robdy2k]

UPDATE - after the reset I let it sit at the logo screen for a few minutes then the phone came back to life and now works!

???

 

[ironass]

Have you tried the options I posted for you here?

First and foremost... your phone is not, "bricked"!

Bricked is a term used when describing a phone that will not even turn on.

Try the recovery options in post #1, here. Failing that, you can re-flash your firmware for O2, using Odin, as described in #1.7, here.

 

[robdy2k]

A helpful guide which inspires confidence. Cheers Ironass. I was 'bricking' it a bit last night that my phone was broke but I am much more confident now I've had a full days use out of it today and will be trying to persuade my partner to upgrade tonight (not an easy task as she doesn't understand the technology or the value and just saw me stressing out last night).

I will be more careful about how I use the term now!

Thanks

 

[ngrome]

Hello, the reason I am here is I searched this issue due to bricking my S2 while attempting the upgrade to Jelly Bean 4.1.2. AT&T sent me a text that this upgrade was available and provided a link to the upgrade within the text, and the link led to a page which advised upgrading the firmware through the Kies application.

Well, I downloaded the latest version of Kies (for PC, not wireless) and attempted the upgrade thinking confidently I would succeed like the last upgrade, so yes, I didn't bother to do a back up.

Well of course, the firmware upgrade failed and Kies error messages advised me to go into recovery mode and do a restore, which also failed after multiple attempts so I called Samsung tech support and they said that the Kies Over the Air (wireless) app installed on my phone was preventing the firmware upgrade from completing, so they advised me to call AT&T to disable/remove that app, but the phone is already bricked and we could not get to it. It was stuck in recovery mode, so AT&T just sent me a replacement phone and I have to send my bricked phone back.

But why would AT&T advertise the upgrade was available while a known problem with the wireless version of the app (Kies) which is used to distribute the upgrade exists?

But my main concern now was that I had quite a bit of information on the phone, not the SIM card, including contacts and other private info so my question is, will all that information be recoverable by AT&T even though the phone was bricked (and they are able to restore a new operating system on the phone through their own methods), or am I assured that at least any private data that was stored on the bricked phone was wiped out during the failed upgrade? I would rather not have the data recoverable at this point in case they reissue my old phone as a refurbished unit for obvious reasons.

Thanks in advance.

 

[ngrome]

I may not be using the term "bricked" properly in my previous post as well, but it is stuck in recovery mode or the prompt for recovery mode, it does turn on, but does not give any other options, and the hold volume/power buttons down does not do anything and it stays in that same state, cannot get onto an home screen, etc.