My S8 G950F got stuck in a boot loop after an update (there was little storage left before the update, but not sure if this is the reason for failure). I tried flashing it with Odin (with HOME CSC), which was successful according to Odin. Now if I start the phone, it says “installing update”, then “no command” and loads recovery mode.
If in recovery mode I select “Lacking storage booting” it will go into “Optimizing app X of …” which goes through all the apps, but then loops again until it reaches some other “Android recovery” mode that has only 4 options: “try again”, “power off”, “erase app data”, “view rescue logs” – the last two options regular recovery mode doesn’t have.
My goal is to backup or pull the data from the phone as sadly it was not backed up.
One thing I have left to try is to install TWRT via Odin and try to do a backup using it. From what I understand, in order to do so I need OEM to be unlocked in dev settings which would allow the bootloader to be unlocked. I don’t think I had OEM unlocked. I also don’t know if my bootloader is unlocked regardless of that setting: there is a “reboot into bootloader” option in recovery and when I do that it boots into a mode that says “Downloading” and looks exactly like regular downloading mode but without the writing that usually shows in the background (such as “odin mode”, model, binary etc.) Does this mean I have bootloader unlocked or is it a locked version? Is there a way to find out if OEM and bootloader are unlocked without booting?
Another Hail Merry option would be to wipe and factory reset it after flashing (which hopefully will take it out of the boot loop) and then root and try to recover some files with a data recovery tool, but is there any real chance of getting stuff back? Since data on SSD isn’t truly erased without being overwritten, it has to be recoverable somehow, right?
Finally, I would like to know if anyone has any idea what could potentially be wrong given the symptoms? Since flashing didn’t fix it, then it isn’t the firmware that’s the problem, so it seems? But then what is it?
