My Samsung Galaxy S3 may have just bricked. I've been using cyanogenmod since August, and I downloaded an update last night that cause nonstop crashing. I wiped the phone to start over, but no matter which version I reloaded I got errors while in recovery mode. I don't know what I did, but now I've reached a point where hitting factory reset produces an error that won't let me wipe the phone anymore to even start over. It angers me to no end, but I may have to just go down to the T-Mobile store and buy whatever they're offering to stick my Ting SIM into to get working again. I'm traveling right now for the holidays, so patiently waiting for another E-Bay phone isn't really an option.
If we're dealing with a Ting GSM SIM card (and not a Ting CDMA LTE SIM card),
any cheap prepaid T-Mobile phone from down at Walmart/Best Buy/gas station/Craigslist/etc. should work. Doesn't matter if it's unlocked or not, the Ting GSM SIM card has a T-Mobile ICCID, so it won't get locked out as an unsupported SIM.
As for what happened to your S3? Are you riding stable, snapshot, or nightly with CM? I'm assuming you're talking about a CM update here and not a general app update from Google. (Either outcome, you probably need to talk with someone active in the CM community
directly for support.) This said, I'm assuming you're talking about a CM nightly update given the mention of other CM builds, and will address the issue as such. Dalvik cache might need to be manually wiped, but this is me stabbing in the dark.
You're rather sparse on details, however
I found someone else riding the bleeding edge nightly who's now dealing with bootloop issues earlier today who's running the latest nightly on an AT&T S3. If the problem you're experiencing is at all related to running nightly builds and perpetually updating it instead of riding the stable releases? Well, it's typically a bad idea to ride the bleeding edge on your daily driver as they call it the bleeding edge for a reason... you use it long enough, you're gonna get cut. It's a development channel for a reason, and they aren't joking around when they say,
"Development channel - a.k.a. Nightlies, usually generated every 24 hours, experimental, newest features, unstable!"In your position, I personally wouldn't run anything but the CM 12.1 (Android 5.1) snapshot from November of last year on my S3 if I used one as it's still considerably more current than the old Android 4.x builds from Samsung until another snapshot is released. Leave the CM 13/14 (Android 6.x and 7.x builds) for when
it goes stable as the CM 14.1 nightly builds have been notoriously unstable, worse than their usual nightlies.
I don't mention this to be unsympathetic or to rub salt in the wound of what you're dealing with. What you're dealing with stinks, and I genuinely hope you can unbrick the sucker and keep using it. However, I am mentioning it anyway to hopefully help coach you toward pulling away the proper lessons from a point of failure of this nature - namely that people shouldn't use nightly software builds on devices they use regularly and expect stability on, and not to get upset at either yourself or the developers, or develop a bad taste in one's mouth over the CM project itself if a nightly release breaks the phone. Failure is
okay, it gives us an opportunity to learn and grow in a world that is fundamentally imperfect and comes with no guarantee but the existence of
HaShem Himself and the need for the covering of Yeshua to live. Nobody of the purely meatsack persuasion is perfect (I know I'm not), so give others the same slack and benefit of the doubt as you desire for yourself. Crap happens. :)
And if you can't save it and do have to right it off? Just remember, you got another six months out of a phone that you originally thought you'd have to trash last summer.
Anyway, contact the dev team and try not to monkey with it more than you have at this point until you've got a game plan. Try contacting Team Hacksung for some support on the issue directly either through
IRC or the proper
sub-forum for your model S3.
Hopefully, with a little time, patience and wisdom, you'll be able to unpooch the thing. I'll be rooting for you and that outcome.