My Galaxy S7 won't turn on and won't charge

Kitten of the Broccoli · November 7, 2017

Let me start from the beginning:

I bought my International Galaxy S7 secondhand from someone on eBay who says that he got it from a liquidation company and that it was in pretty much mint condition, which, upon inspecting it myself, was seemingly true. However, it didn't take long for me to start noticing that it had one major issue: every few days - every day, at first - the phone would just randomly freeze, then restart and get stuck in a bootloop for a random amount of loops each time. At first, I seemed to be able to get it out of the loop by getting it into TWRP(I installed a custom recovery and rooted it, by the way), and then just restarting it. Though, after a while, this method stopped working.

The only semblance of a pattern I could notice was that the S7 REALLY didn't like me using Snapseed to edit my images, as the freezing happened most often when opening RAW images.

And that brings us to yesterday... I take a picture of my new desk to show to my Discord buddies, and as soon as I go to export it from Snapseed, my phone freezes, and restarts. I just plugged it in and set it down and proceeded to start putting said desk together. About 15 minutes later, I checked in on it, and it was STILL in a loop. So, I booted it into TWRP, and rebooted from there. Though, after another 15-20 minutes, it STILL was stuck. This is where I decide to go ahead and clear the cache, and even Dalvik cache, but of course it didn't do jack shit. So, I started performing Nandroid backups on my stuff(I had to do it all separately because my SD card couldn't hold a full backup of everything), and then started looking on XDA for a ROM to replace the stock one I was running, because I was still thinking that I was facing a software issue...

While I downloaded the new ROM, I just decided to let my phone keep trying to boot up because I was still holding onto a tiny bit of hope that it would eventually just fix itself. In hindsight, this probably wasn't the smartest idea.

I finished building my desk, and went to check on the S7, and all that I saw was a black screen with the LED up top lit up blue. "OK," I thought,"It's just stuck in-between the bootup logo and the Samsung startup animation again." So, I hold volume down and power to reboot it, but nothing happened. I didn't feel it vibrate, I didn't see the bootup logo, it just stayed black(and blue). I tried plugging it in... Nothing. Tried connecting it to my computer... Nada. Tried using my old USB jig(that thing that people would use to get their phones into Download mode)... Absolutely fucking nothing.

After panicking and rushing to my local AT&T store because I lost my SIM tray ejector tool, I ended up putting my SIM back into my old Note 4, and that's where I'm at today. The S7's battery has since died, and it still won't charge or do anything at all. I tried calling Samsung customer service, but they said that they have never heard of this issue, and even if they had, there's really nothing they can do since I have the International variant of the phone. I then tried some local phone repair shops, but they all seem to mostly just focus on things like phone screens and batteries, so I'm pretty much stuck.

While this problem doesn't appear to be completely unheard of, I can't find anything about a fix, as it's either a hardware fault, or an extremely fucked-up firmware issue. Does anyone have any suggestions? Maybe there's a North American repair service that can fix problems like this? I'm getting rather fed up with Samsung and the fact that the last 2 phones that I've had from them is both have had very annoying faults, whether it be a broken GPS and vibration that stops working a few minutes after boot, or frequent and damaging bootloops...

D13H4RD · November 7, 2017

My Galaxy Note7 did this before. Factory reset and then something got screwed and it kept rebooting until it died. Funnily enough, it happened shortly after Samsung announced the recall. Guess it sacrificed itself to save me.

I'm not sure exactly what's the best way to fix this. From what you said, I really suspect it's a corrupted NAND. Sadly, there's no obvious way to fix it.

If you can get it in ODIN mode, there may be hope, but if it doesn't boot up at all, you're SOL.