With the understanding that RC2 will be superseded by RLS1 very very shortly, I thought I would share my godmode "upgrade" experience from yesterday anyway:
For me, the elapsed time between booting into Amon Ra and finally getting a booted OS (let's define that as the earliest you can pull up the lock ring and get to a homsecreen, even if it is very laggy still) :
20 minutes grand total.
The total time before I could launch an app or actually use the phone in a meaningful way was more like 30 minutes.
Total time before the pain of initial lagginess no longer called attention to itself (ie, you could use the phone without the thought of "damn this is slow" intruding in your mind) : hours.
The long delays during the install process happen at times that are different from what I expected
Flashing the actual zip while in Amon Ra:
8 minutes total. Progress bar seems to hang on around the 50% mark (right under the "u" in Virus") for at least half the time, then the bar fills in to 100% suddenly, then a long wait at 100%, then back to the interactive Amon Ra interface.
At this point Rosie 3.0 carousel "non-landscape" people such as myself flash the appropriate mod ( I did the one with Rosie 3.0 widgets). Very brief ( a few seconds to navigate to your zip, a few seconds to flash).
What happens after you select "Reboot now" in Amon Ra?
First, the "white screen with black 'htc EVO 4G' text" (Note this is different from the "white screen with green 'htc' logo" you get later (and indeed any time Sense reloads, whether due to crashes, first boot, reloading after titanium activity etc)).
This lasted only 3 minutes.
Then the glowing green "SYNEAGY AOM" ( <-- not a typo, look carefully at boot animation ;> ) throbbing-synapse-loop boot animation.
This lasted 9 minutes. Sometimes the synapses throbbed very slowly.
Then finally a brief glimpse of lock ring on top of wallpaper. No shortcut icons visible. If you don't touch phone, the screen promptly goes to sleep. Which is fine. It could probably use a little quiet time at this point.
(If you just touch the power button but don't actually mess with lock ring it's amusing to watch what time it is. First it will be something like UTC time, totally off from your local time unless you're actually in England. Then a while later it will spontaneously change to local time, except in 24-hour format (eg 21:57) . Then finally it will revert to 12-hour format (eg 9:57). Takes several minutes.)
Finally I unlocked it and the first thing I was greeted with was a modal dialog saying "Process com.android.phone is not responding...Force Close / Wait". I chose wait and immediately was shown the "white screen with green 'htc' logo" for a good five minutes of totally non-interactive wait time.
I left the phone alone during this time and eventually it finished doing what it was doing and it fell back asleep. When I woke it up, I was placed directly in the Setup Wizard app. Interestingly, the first screen of the setup wizard has a 'back' button. Not feeling like signing in to anything just yet I hit 'back'. Again came the "white screen with green 'htc' logo", then a desktop with a dialog just saying "Loading" for yet another minute.
At last a real homsecreen appears (now with the familiar constellation of six icons, and, again, no clock/weather widget), the tips widget throws up a balloon with its first tip, and finally you can actually use the phone.
This would be around the 30 minute point since the flashing process started.
There are times during this initial break-in stage where it seems the phone is almost unresponsive. Touches may *begin* to get responded to after a five second lag or more. The response itself can take 5 seconds more to do something simple like simply redrawing a button with its highlight color after a button press, let alone performing the requested action.
That phone / wait dialog comes up a lot. For instance I just saw it again today when someone actually called me. I chose wait and then answered the call normally.)
Ominously, I also saw a dialog later concerning "android.process.media" which concerns me because the point of god mode is to change the way the filesystem works for basic I/O functions.
Still haven't ever signed in to my main google account yet. Seeing how far I can take this before I do. I suspect as soon as I sign in it will start downloading all my apps from the Market. Which force closed on me by the way when I was doing something totally unrelated (just poking around Spare Parts I believe it was).
Also the first time I tried all this the internet browser app simply did not work right out of the box. Force closed every time. (I restored app+data for just the browser app from my titanium backup I made (while running RC2 non god mode) prior to the install and got my browser back. That didn't give me warm and fuzzy feelings.)
Later I repeated the entire install procedure from scratch and did not experience market FC's or internet browser FC's. Not sure why the second time would be different.
Note I was not connected to AC power during any flashing or initial boot up.
For those playing along at home, you may be curious to know things like what kind of phone do I have, how did I prepare to flash, and what was the exact sequence of steps during wiping / flashing?
OG Evo HW 004, original SD card ( I believe that means 8 GB class 2), never toyed with any kind of partitioning. Previous ROMS have all worked fine with the SD card which has the usual folders full of pictures, nandroids, titanium, folders created by previous ROMs including Synergy, etc.
Latest radios, PRI, PRL, GPS works, 4G keys happy, never had any drama.
Before flashing God Mode I was already running Synergy RC2, and once I was ready to say good bye, I did a nandroid backup, then rebooted, connected to a PC and offloaded any new camera pictures, some recent nandroids and uploaded the ROM image ( I did check the md5) and the Rosie mod I intended to use (dkdude, not fdb) . Then ran titanium, backing up all user plus system apps, then finally did one last quadrant test (just under 1000), took a deep breath, and rebooted into Amon Ra 2.3 .
From there I did these wipes in this order:
rotation
battery
dalvik
cache
data
factory reset
Yes I realize many of these are redundant. Then, to be *really* redundant, I left wipe mode and went into flash zip mode and flashed calkulins format all tool. I believe this also wipes boot amongst other things.
So now at this stage the phone is fairly re-virginized. The only thing I haven't touched is the SD card which has the zips I want to flash.
Now I flash the actual synergy RC2 god mode zip (as described at the very top), then the rosie mod, getting no errors for either one, and then without further ado selected reboot now, which brings us back to the firstboot behavior chronicled above.
Edit: I did restore quadrant and got 1600 on my first run: make of that what you will.
[Reserved for updates on 4G experience, bluetooth, gapps, general usability etc...]
Quick update: I did successfully test 4G, WiFi, bluetooth, and GPS.
I finally signed in to Google and sure enough market downloaded all my apps. This may be a Synergy thing- Synergy also seems to remember things from previous installs despite the elaborate wiping regime described above, such as the password to my WiFi access point some search term history, maybe a few other settings.
Anyways, during the download and install of a moderately small number of market apps (I have like 15, all free) the phone was effectively unusable. Almost unresponsive. Finally a half hour after the install activity was no longer apparent, things seemed to settle down and the phone gradually seemed to become normal again.
Quadrant scores were originally as low as 1200 something. Then got it up in the 1400's, then finally i have seen several in a row in the mid-1500's. Again, for reference, I consistently got around 1000 with vanilla RC2 (and the same hardware gave me 1200 with CyanogenMod 7.1 RC1 for you AOSP fans out there).
And this is supposed to be an upgrade???
The party line is *once the phone has had time to settle in* things get a little faster in real world experience. I am in fact beginning to see the promised behavior now, 12 hours after install (including maybe 4 hours of heavy usage)
Certainly the improvements to the benchmark scores are immediate, but we can all agree actual 'driveability' is more important.
So far, I will say it's looking better with each passing hour.
As an example, the simple spinning carousel action (remember I'm doing the Rosie 3.0 carousel mod) under RC2-non-GM was clearly straining the limits of what the Evo could smoothly render. With god mode, it's clearly different, faster and smoother.
Here's the feeling I get: every time you do something for the *first time*, let's say the first time you launch a particular app, activate a certain part of the Rosie UI, get a new dialog box, there's a punishing lag. The *next time* you launch that app, or swipe that tab, or experience that same condition, it's faster. Indeed perhaps faster than it ever was in plain old RC2.
But the make-or-break thing will always be stability, or should I say predictability: days from now, if I still see a lot of Force Close's, or if I am still experiencing unexpected moments of slowness while it "learns" how to do something (and you know how Murphy's law works- it will always happen at just that moment where you can't afford to be surprised by a mysterious delay) - well, it may be back to regular Synergy. Hard to say. I'm a patient person. I intend to give this a good long audition.
When I Flashed the Alpha it took forever, but yes RC2+ was a very pleasant flash by comparison, just flash ROM - flash mount zip - flash carousel + widgets - flash unmount zip. then Im using link2sd and TB. Does anyone know of another a2sd gui that is good? want to prepare for RLS1
I had a similar experience giving rc2+ a try. It was borderline useless on my phone for whatever reasons. Went from rc2 to + after a nandroid backup and did a wipe of dalvik and cache. After about 6 hours of usage I said screw it and restored back to my nandroid backup which is blisteringly fast. The "seat test" on the phone wasn't great at all but the quadrant resulted in test results in the 1700-1800 range which is awesome. I too am on the stock class 2 card and I planned on buying a new card so maybe the results will be better with a new card?
TruthAEE said:
When I Flashed the Alpha it took forever, but yes RC2+ was a very pleasant flash by comparison, just flash ROM - flash mount zip - flash carousel + widgets - flash unmount zip. then Im using link2sd and TB. Does anyone know of another a2sd gui that is good? want to prepare for RLS1
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The main Synergy thread is full of discussions on a2sd stuff.
Interesting that you flashed the rosie mod using the mount / unmount strategy. I chose to use a rosie mod that had specifically been re-written for godmode. I suppose you end up at the same place either way.
I wonder how it would run on a 32gb class 10.
Sent from my locked tight OG EVO using XDA Premium App
I have seen a lot of wildy varying reports on upgrading your SD card. When it works, it works. It's awesome. But there are also reports of even "class 10" cards that did not improve performance at all. Could come down to who the SD card manufacturer is.
If you tweak everything just right (note most people say to leave dalvik in internal memory regardless) with a swap partitioin, ext3 paritition, a2sd, then maybe one of the new custom kernels that have just come out, and maybe even apply the v6 super charger memory management trick, I bet this ROM could fly, benchmark or no benchmark.
As a first time phone rooter, I read for several days on end through this and other forums, acquiring the knowledge to hack my streak. I was finally ready and successfully put Gingerstreak 2.4.4 on my Dell Streak 5 from stock Rogers/Canada following all the recommended procedures. Yahoo!
Used options in install file:
stageui
us160
It seemed to be fine at first, but got progressively worse. i.e., rebooting, freezing, choppy, sleep of death and huge battery drain issues. (the common problems) Then after a few days it was pretty much totally unreliable. I tried Green Power and a task killer app to no great avail. So I decided to put a more stable version on the phone. I had planned on putting the [ROM] [INTL] [WIP] DSC v0.62b on the phone and began to follow the great instructions in that post.
At some point I read it was required/recommended to move all my apps to the phone so I could keep them. I went ahead and did that and right away my phone stopped lagging. I waited a half day longer and no more rebooting issues. The battery would be at 60% or better by 5pm as opposed to almost dead. It's been 3 days now and it runs pretty darn snappy, solid and reliable. I do get a 4-5 minute SOD (sleep of death) after (some) disconnections from charging cable, but that seems to be it. I will now begin moving the apps back to the SD card (one or two a day) to see how it affects the operation of the unit.
Just thought someone would like to know...
Solved 99% of the WAIT/FC popups and 5-10 second freezes for me as well. I'm still on SimpleStreak 1.2 with PerfUpdate. Thanks brainsquishy!
Your welcome krazman325.
By the way...I put about 6 of my apps back onto the SD card to see what happened. It immediately began to act up again. Moved them back and I'm OK. I guess until someone has a fix for that, all my apps will have to stay off the SD card until I move to the DSC release.
Regards...
Awesome idea!
Fixed most of my issues (phone was freezing whenever I tried to install apps, but only a quick reboot to the boot image screen).
Thanks much!
I was hoping this would help, but even with half uninstalled and the other half moved to phone, I'm still getting freezes, restarts and now today (after working with no problems for about 24 hours, it's got into reboot cycle and won't recover).
I'm going to have to try another ROM as this clearly isn't working for my Streak.
Who'd think they could be so different?!
So which ROM is next best then?
Latest Thread Update :
16/04/2013 ---- Added Rob's DFG trick Method for new comers to save searching for it .
04/03/2013 ---- Added XXEMB1 as Most reliable freeze free build .
01/03/2013 ---- added advice on kernels with SDS Fix .
26/02/2013 ---- Added links to LagFix (fstrim) premium ,and DFG.
Now that the Galaxy S3 Sudden Death Syndrome has supposedly been fixed by the Update 7 by Samsung patched for Kernel and Recovery ,
There is some poping up posts about the Galaxy S3 freezing with lockups,Lockscreen not responding that requires pulling out battery
and ending up with unsual rebooting and bootlooping which is a very awkward and annoying issue, especially the Q&A section which contains
a lot of angry S3 users reporting this problem ; Ex
Galaxy S 3 keeps freezing every 5 mins (50+ freezes a day)
Galaxy S3 keeps freezing
Well i decided to make this thread in the benefit of spotting the problem and to make sure we have accurate causes and eventually elaborate a solution to this disturbing problem.
Share your experiences down by posting the ROM, the Kernel, the Recovery and the Bootloader that you are on right now, so we can filter the answers and relate them with the freezing problems on The Galaxy S3.
Reported Issue Reasons :
1) - Facebook app for Android.
2) - Google Chrome Browser.
3) - Some Samsung Based Android 4.1.2 builds/Roms causing freezing.
4) - In Some cases, Media Scanner causing lockups.
5) - In Some cases, Swiftkey Flow Bêta causing freezing.
Possible Direct Reason :
Originally Posted by : Rob2222
The freezes are caused by the sudden death fix. On that kind of freezes the phone unfreeze itself after 5-25 minutes.
The phone freezes when writing data to an affected eMMC block.
An eMMC block is affected, when it's internal block pararameters (as f.e. write count for that block) are in such a state, that these parameters trigger a corrupted block without SD-fix (4.1.1) or trigger a freeze with SD-fix (4.1.2).
When a phone is hitting an affected block with a writiing operation is completely unpredictable.
So these freezes can occur on almost each situation on the smartphone when it writes data.
But you have indeed a higher chance to trigger a freeze when writing much data.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Possible Current Solution :
I. If the phone freezes, wait until it unfreezes itself. I think this is the important part.
II. The DFG "Dummy File Generator" is only used to trigger the freezes.
III. I think you could also just wait for the freezes to be triggered by all-day-use, but this would be very impractical to wait 20 minutes to
unfreeze when you need the phone.
IV. So we write dummy data with DFG to provoke the freezes.
Highly Recommended Advice :
The write access to an affected block without Sudden Death fix seems to damage the data on this block which _can_ lead to a sudden death.
Because of that I would recommend to stay with KERNELS that have the Sudden death fix included, even if it could cause freezes.
Reported Most Stable " Freeze Free " Build/Rom :
XXEMB1 and all Custom Roms based on this build.
Dummy File Generator :
Alternate Working Solution :
LagFix (fstrim) Premium
Rob's Dummy File Generator Method to solve persistant freezes on the Galaxy S3 :
Rob's DFG Method , Please take a moment to thank him for his contribution to solving this problem.
Let me repeat it again:
Whoever has problems with freezes, please try this at least and give positive or negative feedback here. We have good experience with this method to sightly reduce and/or completely eleminate the freezes.
No, this means that the problems occur when writing the eMMC, not reading.
Try to wait for the phone to unfreeze (5-25 minutes) it seems that it helps and the freezes get less.
If you have that kind of freezes, that are caused by the SD-Fix your phone will unfreeze after that time without reboot.
To provoke the freezes you can also empty your internal storage as much as possible and then use the dummy file generator (generate all) to fill the internal memory 1-2 times.
After each run you can simply delete the dummy files with the delete button.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/d...nomunomu.dummy
Free up 8GB or more to have enough free space on internal memory.
If you have 8 GB free internal space, write 2 times dummy files. 2x8GB are 16GB. The internal wear leveling algorithm spreads these writes over the whole 16GB physical chip area.
There is a good chance that writing EACH sector on the eMMC resets/averages out the internal block data (f.e. write counters) that trigger the Bug and the Fix (Freeze).
If the phone freezes while writing the dummy data (it propably will), just let the phone do what it wants. It will continue to work after 2-25 minutes for each freeze.
This unfreeze after 5-25 minutes seems to have a positive effect.
You can have more than one freeze while doing this. Just let the phone do what it wants. If the dummy file generator crashs cause of a freeze, just restart the App.
When your finally able to write a amount of 16GB data (2x8GB dummy files) in subsequent runs without freezes you have a good chance that your freezes are gone for now or maybe even forever.
You need to write a minimum amount of 16GB data (or more) with this procedure! If you write less data, you didn't even need to thest this DFG method.
The idea behind it:
The SD-Fix causes freezes when writing eMMC blocks in a specific eMMC block parameter state. There parameters are for example the block write counter. Just some few blocks are affected, but when they get written, the SD-Fix freezes the eMMC. Now it seems to have a positive ("healing") effect to wait for the eMMC to unfreeze itself, which happens after 5-25 minutes. For all day use this is not very practicable. So we write just some dummy data to the eMMC to trigger the freezes when we do have the time to wait for the unfreeze. Thats all.
-- From the forums I monitor I get 80-90% positive feedback that the S3 gets again long-time-stable (usable) with this DFG-method.
I got from 10-15 freezes/day to only 1 single freeze in the last 2 weeks without factory reset.
-- Some people needed to write 60-80GB of data until the phone became stable.
In the hardest case (only 1 case) I know, someone wrote about 1TB (1000GB) of data and then the phone became finally stable. He didn't got warranty so DFG was his last resort and after that it finally got stable.
In most cases 20-60GB written data should be enough to get back the phone on a stable state.
If youre familiar with odin, you can also flash XXEMB5 or newer firmware, cause it seems this includes a new, better SD-Fix that doesn't casue freezes anymore. DFG is not needed in this case.
PIT File :
nhariamine said:
Now that the Galaxy S3 Sudden Death Syndrome has supposedly been fixed by the latest update 7 by Samsung patch for Kernel and
Recovery ,There is some poping up posts about the Galaxy S3 freezing and ending up with unsual rebooting and bootlooping which is a
very awkward and weird and annoying issue, especially the Q&A section which contains a lot of angry S3 users reporting this problem.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It's a shame that this post has been mostly ignored in favour of the "SDS" one, but I do actually believe both issues are related. My I9300 is running stock - always has been - and suffered with "proper" SDS last November.
The initial symptoms were that my previously perfectly-behaved phone would would randomly FC apps that didn't before, and some of my photographs and video taken on the phone suddenly became corrupted and unusable.
Finally, one Saturday morning, I woke up to find the phone stuck in a boot loop, going from the "Samsung Galaxy S3" black-and-white boot scree to the first blue sweep of the Samsung logo, then reboot. It would power-off and power-on and I could enter ODIN or recovery modes fine, but it wouldn't boot any further.
I managed to get my photos and stuff off the phone through USB in recovery, and decided to wipe and flash the same stock ROM via ODIN.
This process failed - it couldn't partition the device correctly. None of the flash counters were reading anything so I popped it into my local Vodafone shop where they said it just needed the firmware popping back on and they'd have it ready in an hour.
I went back and they said they hadn't been able to load the software and it would have to go off for repair. *sigh*
It came back about 5 days later with a repair report stating that they'd replaced the "main board" - presumably because of the eMMC lockup bug.
It was only after this that the whole "Sudden Death" news came about and I realised what had happened to my phone. The eMMC check app says that my new controller is the same "faulty" version so I've been waiting with baited breath for "safe" official firmware.
The update system threw XXELL5 my way just before Christmas, and I thought that was that, but a coule of weeks ago the phone started hiccuping again. I knew I'd seen this before and my heart sank.
Last week another update was available, this time XXELLA. Since then, all hell has broken loose on my phone. It is locking up about 5 times a day. Initially, I was rebooting it manually (by holding in the power button). Tuesday morning I was woken by my wife saying "shouldn't you be up by now?" - glanced at my phone and it was frozen on the black-and-white boot logo - no alarm! Arrggh! It's dead!
Powered off, back on again and it booted fine. Hmmm, this isn't quite the same as before then. Having seen the advice about leaving it when it's locked, I've been doing that religiously and, so far, it's always woken up again by itself, but it's definitely indicative of a fault somewhere.
I've tried to check what's happening with adb logcat (I'm not rooted - fully stock - so can't see dmesg) and there is always some sort of I/O error when the freeze happens - often an sqlite database. Then, a couple of days ago, three photos and one video suddenly became corrupted.
I've realised that there are two issues, and only one of them has been "fixed".
The main problem, I believe, is that the flash memory is dying quite rapidly. We all know that flash memory has a limited write life, and wear levelling is supposed to extend that life beyond the typical lifespan of a device (say 5 years for a PC SSD drive?). For some reason, the flash in these devices is wearing out MUCH more rapidly.
The "faulty" eMMC controller obviously had a problem when dealing with faulty flash cells and would get stuck in a permanent loop, bricking the device. As far as I'm aware, the "fix" that has been applied prevents this permanent loop. The system still needs to try and handle disk errors with the flash memory, but it's not a permanent freeze any more and eventually (once it's finished dealing with flash faults - often unable to recover the problem) the system will break out of the freeze and carry on as before.
Sometimes this means that an app has bombed out as it couldn't read it's data correctly, but most people would either have forcibly rebooted their phone, or not notice as that app would just restart next time they used it. Sometimes, however, it means that something more important has crashed due to the disk I/O problem, resulting in the phone needing to spontaneously reboot itself.
What this boils down to is - yes, I believe that there has been a fix applied for the "faulty" eMMC controller getting stuck in a permanent, irretrievable loop. But no, I don't believe the actual original problem has been addressed - namely that the flash memory is dying at an unacceptably fast rate for ... well ... who knows what reason.
I do have a theory on that too. Recently a friend of mine was looking to change his laptop hard drive for an SSD. I investigated for him and decided that the Samsung 830 series would be his best bet, if he could get hold of them. And why not the newer 840 series? Well - that's purely because the "consumer" version of the 840 uses Samsung's latest triple level cell flash memory. Newer, faster, cheaper to manufacture almost certainly but ... more importantly in this case ... less resilient. How does 1000 write cycles grab you? They claim that the wear levelling algorithm in the drives mean that their lifetime is still pretty reasonable, but I'm not convinced in the real world.
Any idea what flash they use in the S3? I have no idea, but I betcha it's something (a) cheap and (b) new(ish).
I'm now at a bit of an impasse with my phone, however. When I returned it for repair last year it was properly frozen. No-one could do anything to fix it, the flash wouldn't format or write firmware - the only recourse was replacing internal hardware (or the entire phone).
This time, however, it works ... sort of. I'm occasionally losing photos I've taken and occasionally finding it's locked up and occasionally having to wait for it to recover. No repair centre has the time to "live with" my phone for half a day, waiting to see what happens with it - and even if they did, they'd blame a rogue app or "something left over from the upgrade" - they'll just factory wipe it, maybe flash the firmware and send it back again "repaired".
It's tempting to "lose" it and pay my insurance excess ... but even then, I won't know when the problem will strike again - but that's the thing ... I'm certain it would be back.
I used to love this phone. Now I can't rely on it. I can't rely on it storing the photos I take with it. I can't rely on it ringing when someone calls. I can't rely on texts getting through to me on time. I can't even rely on it waking me up in the morning.
It's sat next to me now,lying on the desk with the screen all shiny and black. I have no idea if it's fine, or frozen. Is someone calling me right this second? I have no idea. Oh, there we go - pressed the lock buton - it's awake. I shouldn't have to check my phone every ten minutes to see if it's working or not.
*sigh* sorry - rant over.
Suffice to say, that's my take on it. If I thought it would help diagnose something "fixable", I'd root and see what dmesg is doing, but I'm convinced this is hardware and I'm also certain that Samsung aren't going to take the blindest bit of notice.
I'm pretty sure there will be more and more people complaining that their phones are misbehaving over the next few months, but it's vague enough of a problem that the "repair" will be wiping - just long enough to take them over the first year warranty...
QorbeQ said:
It's a shame that this post has been mostly ignored in favour of the "SDS" one, but I do actually believe both issues are related. My I9300 is running stock - always has been - and suffered with "proper" SDS last November.
The initial symptoms were that my previously perfectly-behaved phone would would randomly FC apps that didn't before, and some of my photographs and video taken on the phone suddenly became corrupted and unusable.
Finally, one Saturday morning, I woke up to find the phone stuck in a boot loop, going from the "Samsung Galaxy S3" black-and-white boot scree to the first blue sweep of the Samsung logo, then reboot. It would power-off and power-on and I could enter ODIN or recovery modes fine, but it wouldn't boot any further.
I managed to get my photos and stuff off the phone through USB in recovery, and decided to wipe and flash the same stock ROM via ODIN.
This process failed - it couldn't partition the device correctly. None of the flash counters were reading anything so I popped it into my local Vodafone shop where they said it just needed the firmware popping back on and they'd have it ready in an hour.
I went back and they said they hadn't been able to load the software and it would have to go off for repair. *sigh*
It came back about 5 days later with a repair report stating that they'd replaced the "main board" - presumably because of the eMMC lockup bug.
It was only after this that the whole "Sudden Death" news came about and I realised what had happened to my phone. The eMMC check app says that my new controller is the same "faulty" version so I've been waiting with baited breath for "safe" official firmware.
The update system threw XXELL5 my way just before Christmas, and I thought that was that, but a coule of weeks ago the phone started hiccuping again. I knew I'd seen this before and my heart sank.
Last week another update was available, this time XXELLA. Since then, all hell has broken loose on my phone. It is locking up about 5 times a day. Initially, I was rebooting it manually (by holding in the power button). Tuesday morning I was woken by my wife saying "shouldn't you be up by now?" - glanced at my phone and it was frozen on the black-and-white boot logo - no alarm! Arrggh! It's dead!
Powered off, back on again and it booted fine. Hmmm, this isn't quite the same as before then. Having seen the advice about leaving it when it's locked, I've been doing that religiously and, so far, it's always woken up again by itself, but it's definitely indicative of a fault somewhere.
I've tried to check what's happening with adb logcat (I'm not rooted - fully stock - so can't see dmesg) and there is always some sort of I/O error when the freeze happens - often an sqlite database. Then, a couple of days ago, three photos and one video suddenly became corrupted.
I've realised that there are two issues, and only one of them has been "fixed".
The main problem, I believe, is that the flash memory is dying quite rapidly. We all know that flash memory has a limited write life, and wear levelling is supposed to extend that life beyond the typical lifespan of a device (say 5 years for a PC SSD drive?). For some reason, the flash in these devices is wearing out MUCH more rapidly.
The "faulty" eMMC controller obviously had a problem when dealing with faulty flash cells and would get stuck in a permanent loop, bricking the device. As far as I'm aware, the "fix" that has been applied prevents this permanent loop. The system still needs to try and handle disk errors with the flash memory, but it's not a permanent freeze any more and eventually (once it's finished dealing with flash faults - often unable to recover the problem) the system will break out of the freeze and carry on as before.
Sometimes this means that an app has bombed out as it couldn't read it's data correctly, but most people would either have forcibly rebooted their phone, or not notice as that app would just restart next time they used it. Sometimes, however, it means that something more important has crashed due to the disk I/O problem, resulting in the phone needing to spontaneously reboot itself.
What this boils down to is - yes, I believe that there has been a fix applied for the "faulty" eMMC controller getting stuck in a permanent, irretrievable loop. But no, I don't believe the actual original problem has been addressed - namely that the flash memory is dying at an unacceptably fast rate for ... well ... who knows what reason.
I do have a theory on that too. Recently a friend of mine was looking to change his laptop hard drive for an SSD. I investigated for him and decided that the Samsung 830 series would be his best bet, if he could get hold of them. And why not the newer 840 series? Well - that's purely because the "consumer" version of the 840 uses Samsung's latest triple level cell flash memory. Newer, faster, cheaper to manufacture almost certainly but ... more importantly in this case ... less resilient. How does 1000 write cycles grab you? They claim that the wear levelling algorithm in the drives mean that their lifetime is still pretty reasonable, but I'm not convinced in the real world.
Any idea what flash they use in the S3? I have no idea, but I betcha it's something (a) cheap and (b) new(ish).
I'm now at a bit of an impasse with my phone, however. When I returned it for repair last year it was properly frozen. No-one could do anything to fix it, the flash wouldn't format or write firmware - the only recourse was replacing internal hardware (or the entire phone).
This time, however, it works ... sort of. I'm occasionally losing photos I've taken and occasionally finding it's locked up and occasionally having to wait for it to recover. No repair centre has the time to "live with" my phone for half a day, waiting to see what happens with it - and even if they did, they'd blame a rogue app or "something left over from the upgrade" - they'll just factory wipe it, maybe flash the firmware and send it back again "repaired".
It's tempting to "lose" it and pay my insurance excess ... but even then, I won't know when the problem will strike again - but that's the thing ... I'm certain it would be back.
I used to love this phone. Now I can't rely on it. I can't rely on it storing the photos I take with it. I can't rely on it ringing when someone calls. I can't rely on texts getting through to me on time. I can't even rely on it waking me up in the morning.
It's sat next to me now,lying on the desk with the screen all shiny and black. I have no idea if it's fine, or frozen. Is someone calling me right this second? I have no idea. Oh, there we go - pressed the lock buton - it's awake. I shouldn't have to check my phone every ten minutes to see if it's working or not.
*sigh* sorry - rant over.
Suffice to say, that's my take on it. If I thought it would help diagnose something "fixable", I'd root and see what dmesg is doing, but I'm convinced this is hardware and I'm also certain that Samsung aren't going to take the blindest bit of notice.
I'm pretty sure there will be more and more people complaining that their phones are misbehaving over the next few months, but it's vague enough of a problem that the "repair" will be wiping - just long enough to take them over the first year warranty...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm really sorry for the issues you've been living with mate, sure thing is that what you said about memory lockups and blocking writing
firmware is totally true except mine doesn't freeze which is strange, mine is the affected model and is shown in eMMC brick bug check ;
-VTU00M
-06/2012
-Yes, Insane Chip.
The poll i made is permanant, but you have to post down Rom and kernel and recovery and bootloader to be more accurate to spot the problem and maybe some DEV can fix it as soon as possible.
Thanks for sharing ur experience with us mate.
I am totally stock jellybean not rooted etc. Was having bad problems with phone freezing and lagging so started uninstalling things to try and fix. I found the problem was chrome, I had chrome, chrome to phone and chrome beta on took them all off now running silky smooth again.
Sent from my GT-I9300T using Tapatalk 2
kiwiflasher said:
I am totally stock jellybean not rooted etc. Was having bad problems with phone freezing and lagging so started uninstalling things to try and fix. I found the problem was chrome, I had chrome, chrome to phone and chrome beta on took them all off now running silky smooth again.
Sent from my GT-I9300T using Tapatalk 2
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
First ever user to report Chrome as one source of the problem, thanks mate, if any other symptoms occur and have anything to do with freezing, let us know ok !
I made a similar thread here:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2127443
TL;DR?
Phone started to freeze too much,every 5-10 mins.
Unrooted went to total stock after a megawipe.
Phone died after 2 days.
GOt 16 GB motherboard replaced with 32 gb.
I dont get it, you have a 2 year warranty. If it happens, and im sure the vast majority wont have any issues, take it for warranty.
Sent from my GT-I9300 using xda app-developers app
---------- Post added at 06:50 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:49 PM ----------
eggman89 said:
I made a similar thread here:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2127443
TL;DR?
Phone started to freeze too much,every 5-10 mins.
Unrooted went to total stock after a megawipe.
Phone died after 2 days.
GOt 16 GB motherboard replaced with 32 gb.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This though seems vere interesting. Ive read that a few mention their board got replaced by a 32gb. Which prolly doesnt have the bug. So im guessing samsung is very aware of this bug.
Sent from my GT-I9300 using xda app-developers app
This though seems vere interesting. Ive read that a few mention their board got replaced by a 32gb. Which prolly doesnt have the bug. So im guessing samsung is very aware of this bug.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I suppose that freezing problem is occured when a device is severly damaged even when on safe kernel and recovery, as much as i hate to admit it i think freezing S3 is the last symptom before SDS. Let's hope it's not.
nhariamine said:
I suppose that freezing problem is occured when a device is severly damaged even when on safe kernel and recovery, as much as i hate to admit it i think freezing S3 is the last symptom before SDS. Let's hope it's not.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I got 16gb Motherboard replaced with 32gb.
So it may not be as bad as it seems :cyclops:
nhariamine said:
I suppose that freezing problem is occured when a device is severly damaged even when on safe kernel and recovery, as much as i hate to admit it i think freezing S3 is the last symptom before SDS. Let's hope it's not.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I don't know if this is true in every case (freezing S3 is the last symptom before SDS) since I have 4 or 5 freezes on 2 consecutive days about 2 months ago. After that the phone runs normally, not a single freeze since then. And another thing my SGS is the 32 Gb model which is supposed to be safe from SDS (it has a different version of eMMC)
thank goodness for this thread.
this phone has been killing itself up to 3 times in 10 minutes. i really dont know what the hell is going on with this.
i will try uninstalling chrome and see if it helps..
my phone is bone stock running 4.1.2 with the latest firmware updated just today.
data connection is maybe the problem
Hey guys,
i have these freezes too since i updated to 4.1.2.
but in my case it's only when i have mobile data connection or w-lan connection turned on. If i turn off any data connection, it works the whole day without freezing!
It's for two weeks now and today i decided to install CyanogenMod 10.1 to try if this solves my problem.
I'm about to synchronisize my apps (does it automatically when entering google account and choosing "restoren from my account") and the first freeze occured (W-Lan on). But this time the light of the touch keys is full functional. When i touch the screen, the background light of the touch keys turns on. But power button, volume up/down and the touchscreen are frozen.
What I've done:
- rooted and installed CWM
- Cleared Dalvik cache
- wiped all other cache partition and stuff
- installed CyanogenMod 10.1 nightly build 20130208
- factory reset and so on like described in the manuals for installing CFs
Original data of my phone before installing CyanogenMod:
Galaxy S3
AP: I9300XXELL4
CP: I9300XXELL4
CSC: I9300DBTELL1
Android Version:
4.1.2
Kernel-Version:
3.0.31-566833
[email protected]#1
No Branding.
So it is a bit confusing that this only happens with data connection turned on.
I've also read some threads with analytics of the update code and the SD fix so i am well informed now and think it's because of the eMMC bug where it tries to repair the corrupted sectors and freezes while doing this (cause after ~20 minutes everything is fine like nothing happened).
Has anyone an idea or a solution now besides sending it to the local dealer and change it for warranty reasons?
Thanks,
Dark Smile
Odp: **Ultimate Galaxy S3 Unusual Freezing Thread**
It happened to me once, about 2 weeks ago, just after the release of the new firmware LM2. So I have flashed back with PC Odin to the previous LLA but the problem persisted. The phone was freezing after about 5 minutes of use. Forced reboot was needed.
So then I flashed some older 3 files-low level firmware (can't remember what one) in PC Odin nd then back to LM2 again, and everything is alright since then.
Strange...
Wysyłane z mojego Nexus 7 za pomocą Tapatalk 2
After 2 Freezes it's running stable for the moment... i'll watch it over the weekend and give feedback.
Mine is freezing lots now.
First time it went to o2 repair (UK) they claimed they had fixed it, pretty sure they just did a factory reset (which I had done already 3 times). So when I collected it, it froze within 2 minutes.
I'm tracking this repair publicly at http://myo2repair.wordpress.com so you can check out how this sort of thing pans out.
Problem is it can be intermittent, so you could get a couple of hours without a freeze. So it's gone back to repair and they say no fault found. So a bit stuck now.
It will definitely happen again when it's returned. They say after 3 attempts they will give me a refurb device. Samsung themselves give you a brand new sealed device as a replacement. Recommend going through Samsung if in same predicament.
Yes mine also got replaced by a 32 gb one from samsung india today
Sent from my GT-I9300 using xda app-developers app
good news.
after updating today (and uninstalling google chrome) my SGS3 is no longer freezing itself every few minutes!
will report if it starts doing it again. If you dont see me post, assume all is good now.
freeze after 4.1.2
I've had constant freezes when I upgraded to 4.1.2. I tried many versions. all the same.
I rolled back to 4.1.1 and the phone is freeze free for one week now.
Mine started to behave strangely and then started to freeze constantly. Didn't happen after an upgrade, just started happening out of the blue.
So I wiped it completely and flashed it with the latest wanamlite rom (I was on a rooted stock rom before).
Now it only freezes once every few days (still it NEVER used to freeze before, ever).
I think it might have some connection to the facebook app. I've noticed it only freezes shortly after I have been using the facebook app.
SiggiJarl said:
Mine started to behave strangely and then started to freeze constantly. Didn't happen after an upgrade, just started happening out of the blue.
So I wiped it completely and flashed it with the latest wanamlite rom (I was on a rooted stock rom before).
Now it only freezes once every few days (still it NEVER used to freeze before, ever).
I think it might have some connection to the facebook app. I've noticed it only freezes shortly after I have been using the facebook app.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
So far, users are reporting Chrome and Facebook as one of the sources of the freezing in Galaxy s3.More to come, Share ur experiences down
Since the Oreo update the performance of my Nvidia Shield has gone down the toilet. Initially the UI was very sluggish. That seems to have improved a bit although it's still nowhere near as fast and responsive as it was on Nougat. But now the slow loading time of apps is starting to drive me crazy. When I click to open an app like Amazon Prime Video it takes 5-10 seconds for the app to open and then another 5-10 seconds for the home screen to populate with content. Before the update everything was pretty much instant. Is there a way to improve Shield performance after this terrible update? I already did a factory reset and it didn't help.
jhs39 said:
Since the Oreo update the performance of my Nvidia Shield has gone down the toilet. Initially the UI was very sluggish. That seems to have improved a bit although it's still nowhere near as fast and responsive as it was on Nougat. But now the slow loading time of apps is starting to drive me crazy. When I click to open an app like Amazon Prime Video it takes 5-10 seconds for the app to open and then another 5-10 seconds for the home screen to populate with content. Before the update everything was pretty much instant. Is there a way to improve Shield performance after this terrible update? I already did a factory reset and it didn't help.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Same observation for me
I contacted Nvidia support via live chat. They said they would get back to me via email but since this doesn't seem to be an uncommon problem that probably means there's no fix.
Maybe a little of topic. /rant
I wouldn't say mine has been sluggish, but I've been having plenty of problems.
Anytime I tell one of my GH devices to do something on the shield they blink and then give no response. Even in My Activity logs for Home there is nothing in response to my commands.
Starting to really irritate me, I'm about done with Google Home and it's only been a week. Maybe HomeKit won't be so buggy (oh no! Apple :silly. Trying to convince my wife to buy into smart home stuff, and Google is managing to make it seem nothing short of a stupid gimmick. Doesn't do what it should more than half the time.
"Ok, Google, skip the track that's playing."
"Okay, but please try again and specify the device."
"Okay, Google. Skip the track that is currently playing on Spotify on the Shield."
...
...
...
Nothing, not even in activity logs.
Assistant OSD won't go away until I press back or tell google to "go away."
I had to reinstall Spotify today because it wouldn't load ("error" on Spotify start screen), even after reboots.
I just got this thing and have no experience with pre-oreo Shield, but it isn't difficult to understand why so many people are upset.
Might be driving to Best Buy buy the end of the week.
Here I thought my FireTV 2 was being a pita.
I did another factory reset. I did the 2 hour version before going to bed so the Shield would be powered on overnight in case it needed to do some background optimization. It took me hours to set up everything again and the end result was no improvement at all. My Shield Pro is still laggy and slow to respond to commands and might actually be worse now than it was before the factory reset. I've read the cheaper 16GB model is not experiencing this issue so at this point I really regret spending the extra money on the pro model. It's very frustrating to have a $300 streaming box that's barely a year old get completely trashed by an official software update.
jhs39 said:
I did another factory reset. I did the 2 hour version before going to bed so the Shield would be powered on overnight in case it needed to do some background optimization. It took me hours to set up everything again and the end result was no improvement at all. My Shield Pro is still laggy and slow to respond to commands and might actually be worse now than it was before the factory reset. I've read the cheaper 16GB model is not experiencing this issue so at this point I really regret spending the extra money on the pro model. It's very frustrating to have a $300 streaming box that's barely a year old get completely trashed by an official software update.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The 16Gb version also lags after Oreo update
Performance improved after the second factory reset but it seemed to take a day to settle down. It's still not as smooth and responsive as before the update but it's also no longer maddening to use. I had a bunch of Plex crashes after the second factory reset but it seems like that might have stopped. I had a half dozen crashes over the first day and a half but so far none since then.
Oreo is faster than Nougat on phones so I don't understand why the opposite is true on Android TV. People are reporting problems on other Android boxes that got the Oreo update as well so this apparently isn't just a Nvidia issue.
Performance got so bad I ended up doing a third factory reset. After the third one everything is fast and responsive. Not sure why the first two factory resets didn't fix things. This time the only app I downloaded was Emby so maybe an app I downloaded previously was causing problems.
post 7.2 USB and app issues
i have the 2nd gen 16G version of the nvidia shield. i took the 7.2 experience upgrade and i am having lots of troubles:
my external USB hard drive just keeps scanning and never reachable
not able to start up many apps that did rely on that external storage
I have rebooted several times with no effect
i have also tried unplugging everything and then restarting them in order.
I have avoided so far a factory reset or forgetting the USB storage as those are a bit nuclear, but if there is no other option I must since most of my games and Kodi relied on teh USB and they are unusable (I did uninstall Kodi and attempt to reinstall) at bootup of Kodi, it still says "waiting for external drive.