How to Restore or Unbrick Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus

Android always opens the door to various possibilities such as flashing custom ROM or kernel or APK modding etc. These feats can be achieved by providing root access to your device or simply rooting your phone.  In today’s date, rooting or customizing is no rocket science, but people perform these processes carelessly. Certain users hastily carry out the modding/rooting process without properly following instructions. It leads to bricking of the device. It can happen with any device. In this post, we will tell you how you can restore or unbrick Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus back to the previous working condition.

Samsung Galaxy S9 is a dual SIM smartphone launched in February 2018. The phone comes with a 5.80-inch touchscreen display with a resolution of 1440 pixels by 2960 pixels. It runs on a 1.7 GHz octa-core Samsung Exynos 9810 processor and 4 GB of RAM. It comes with Android 8.0 Oreo out-of-the-box. This device packs 64 GB of expandable internal storage. Galaxy S9  brings a 12-megapixel primary camera on the rear and an 8-megapixel camera on the front.

How To Unbrick Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus

What is Bricking and Types of Bricking

Bricking is basically a phone becoming useless due to hardware and software corruption. The corruption occurs due to some erroneous modification or attempts to override and obtain superuser control. There are two types of device bricking situations.

• • • Hard brick
    • Soft brick

    Both these bricks are different from each other. When hard brick happens to your device, it won’t even boot into recovery mode. The booting key combination won’t work when your device got hard bricked. A hard brick is a result of some hardware failure caused while you are trying to root or install a custom ROM on your device.

  • Hard brick happens rarely, and the only thing that can lead is the loss of power supply during the process. When a hard brick occurs it is recommended that you get Samsung-approved technical assistance to fix the issue. Although there are ways like troubleshooting with a JTAG, this is not recommended unless you have proper core knowledge of electronics.The soft brick is quite different from the hard brick. and will let you boot your device into recovery mode. Different conditions can occur when a device is on soft brick, like frequent restarting of the device and unable to switch to the device. But in all cases, you can without any problem boot into recovery mode when your device is soft-bricked. In this case, you can easily recover and unbrick Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus.

Before moving on to the process to recover and unbrick Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus you have to follow the below-mentioned guidelines.

Pre-Requisites

• Charge your phone: Before you proceed with the below information,  ensure that your Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus is at least 70% charged.
• Take Device Backup: 1. Take Device Backup without Root | 2. Backup IMEI and NVRAM | 3. Create Nandroid Backup using TWRP Recovery (Skip if TWRP is not supported)
• Install Latest Driver: Install the Latest Samsung USB Drivers and ODIN Tools on your PC.
• Download: Download the below given required files on your PC.
• Remove the SD card to save the data stored on it in case you haven’t.

Download Required Files:

You can find the links for the Odin zip file and firmware file below. Simply download them and transfer another location on your PC and remember the same.

For the Odin Zip file click the below link

Download Latest ODIN Downloader

For the firmware, Zip file click the below link

In case you don’t know how to use Odin and install stock firmware. Check out the below process.

Steps to Restore and Unbrick Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus 

• Now simply extract the Odin Zip file on your PC.
• Similarly, extract the Firmware Zip file on it.
• Move the Firmware file to the same location where you extracted Odin
• Next is to make a double click on Odin which is an odin.exe file to open it.
  
• After this, boot your device into download mode. For this, turn OFF the device and wait for 10 seconds. Press and hold Home, Power, and Volume Down buttons together until you see a warning message on the screen
• You can now press the Volume UP button to enter into the download mode.
• After this, connect your device to your PC. At the bottom left side, you will see an “Added” message on the Odin window.
• In case the “Added” message didn’t appear, you can follow some basic tips and they are:

  --------> Ensure the drivers have been installed properly
  
  --------> Use a different USB cable/port
  
  --------> Uninstall the driver and re-install them again
  
  --------> Reboot your device and PC too and try once again.

• Now simply load the firmware file into Odin. For this click on the AP button that you will see on Odin. Select the file that ends with “.md5”.
• Next is to make sure to uncheck that in the “Option” section of the Odin, the box for re-partition. Also, pay close attention to other boxes and uncheck all other boxes that accept Auto-Reboot.
• Ensure to follow all the above steps properly.
• You can now click on the “start” button. This will start flashing stock firmware on your Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus. Wait until the “Pass” message appears in Odin’s box at the top left.
  
• • Upon getting the same, you will see your device will automatically restart post which you can disconnect it from the PC.
  • That’s all that you need to do to restore Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus you own.

  In case the “Fail” message appears instead of “Pass”, or you stuck somewhere, disconnect your device from the PC, close Odin and remove the battery of your Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus. Put it back again and repeat the procedure.

So, that’s it. Follow the steps carefully and you will be able to restore and unbrick Galaxy S9 and S9 plus. Let us know if you have got any queries.

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