Uprooting a Galaxy S7 Edge

 Two years ago Annette had paid for her lovely Saumsung Galaxy S7 Edge and wanted to unlock it so she could move to another provider.  At the Sutton high street phone provider they suggested the quickest solution would be to pop in to a local phone shop to unlock it.  The (dodgy?) shop failed to unlock it and needed to keep it for someone to look at it, which in the end took two weeks.  When it came back all was not well, it wouldn't accept software updates or allow phone payments to work.  Annette took it to Samsung who said it had been rooted, would have to be rebuilt and might cost a lot of money with no guarantee of repair.  Eventually Annette purchased a new phone and the old one languished in a drawer.

I opened the drawer recently, saw the phone and thought that we should either sell, use or give it to a worthy cause.  There is also a possibility I could do something "techical" with it - use it as a display, an IOT box or may be run Android / linux natively.  The phone is still worth about £130.   It doesn't have a SIM card but I could run apps, browse the net etc.

I saw that it still has some of Annettes information stored so I decided a factory reset would be a good start.  The phone whinged loudly about doing this wanting repeated confirmation of Google and Samsung account passwords which didn't seem to exist.  Eventually Annette managed to delete her Samsung account from the phone and we were able to complete factory reset.  Unfortunately the phone was now effectively dead, it said "custom binary blocked by FRP lock" and wouldn't boot up.  Oh dear!

I googled solutions and it became clear that we needed to replace the firmware.  It appears that a tool called Odin is used to replace firmware and various firmware versions are available on line.  I tried various sites and in the end found an excellent one, sammobile with up-to-date software and firmware.The firmware download is about 2.3GB and they have a very slow throttled free download available (24 hours).  You have to make sure the firmware is for your specific phone model and country.  I thought it totally fair to pay a small amount (€6.5) for a faster download (10 minutes).  You need to install Samsung drivers and Odin software on your PC and unzip the download files.  You then put the phone into download mode, connect it to the PC which then installs it on the phone in a couple of minutes.

After that it is simply a matter of  restarting and signing on with your Google account (which must have been used to sync with the device previously).  The phone now appears totally fine and useable, altogether a wonderfully uplifting experience.  It is a shame that Samsung were unable to do this.  I believe Odin originated within Samsung and they use it themselves so they should have been able to do what I did in a few minutes.