Samsung Diligently Working Towards HardBrick Fix

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By now, you’ve undoubtedly heard about the Samsung HardBrick bug that has reared its ugly head on various Samsung Exynos 4210-based devices including but not limited to the Galaxy Note GT-N7000, Epic 4G Touch, AT&T Galaxy S II, and the Korean SHW-M250S/K/L. In fact, we recently featured an app made by XDA Elite Recognized Developer Chainfire aimed at determining your particular device’s risk for hard brick.

Samsung is aware of the issue, which was first noted by Elite Recognized Developer Entropy512, and is in the final stages of delivering a solution. Until then, however, it is still advised to not flash any leaked kernels, or kernels in which MMC_CAP_ERASE is present.

As seen on a Google+ post by XDA Elite Recognized Developer codeworkx:

We’ve contacted Samsung about the problem where performing a mmc erase could hardbrick your phone (i9100, i9100g, n7000, m250 – MAG4FA, VYL00M, and KYL00M with firmware revision 0x19 // T989 and I727 with fw rev 0x12) if it’s having a faulty emmc chip.

Read this thread for more informations about it: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1644364 They’re working as hard as possible on a clean solution which will be ready soon. Please be patient and try to not flash any leaked kernels or kernels based on sources where MMC_CAP_ERASE is present.

In fact, earlier today Samsung contacted me to inform the community that progress has been made. In addition simply releasing a fix in the form of updated stock firmware, Samsung is also working with community developers to provide them the information they need to fix the issue in their own releases. This is important because binaries or patches released to end users require extensive (and time-consuming) testing. This way, however, developers can begin to incorporate the fixes as soon as possible.

We’re thinking two steps to provide. One is to share the information that open source developers can use to fix the problem.

The second one is the patches applicable for both Official Samsung ROM users and Custom ROM users. Due to our duties to provide more complete binaries to our customers, our patches require the full testing, which takes longer time.

That’s why we want to share the information first.

Good job, Samsung! It is commendable to see not only your team’s efforts to fix the issue, but also work with the community to ensure that the fix is disseminated as quickly as possible!

Those looking to learn more should head to the discussion thread started by XDA Forum Member androidindian.

[Image taken from egzthunder1’s fantastic article on the matter.]