Rogers ICS

I installed the Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) update from Rogers onto my Samsung Galaxy II LTE.  Overall it went well; I never really feel comfortable with firmware updates so I made sure to make a backup with Samsung Kies before I started.  I also backup my phone to google just in case.

I had to restart the update several times until my phone was fully charged… After that it did its thing and rebooted a bunch of times connecting and disconnecting over USB.  Then the wizard finished and my phone started to boot ICS for the first time which was getting me really excited until an error popped up on the screen and said it couldn’t communicate with the processor and froze.  It remained frozen for 10 minutes so I soft reset the phone (hold power for 10 seconds).  At that point it booted to the samsung logo and just sat on the screen for 1 hour doing nothing… several reboots and nothing… My immediate thought was crap I just bricked my phone.

So, I decided to hard reset the device and try to manually execute the firmware (hold power and volume buttons until the samsung logo shows up, then let go of the power button until it buzzes a few times letting you into a secret recovery menu).

My card was empty and nothing was mounted properly.  Data was gone; no firmware update… wtf.

I decided to wipe the phone and factory reset it.  After that… it booted! Amazing… It booted to the initialization screen you get when its a brand new phone.  I had to reenter may gmail account and it asked if I wanted to restore from the cloud… I clicked the hell yeah button and the device proceeded to manually download and install every application that came from the play store (my other apps didn’t come down but I have a copy of those).  After that I restored my backup and my photos and stuff came back.  Everything was pretty much normal from there other than the annoyance of having to layout all of my screens again.

~JCF