Wow, thank you so much for such valuable information! This is great to know, not just for the Infuse, but in general. I'm actually on the Galaxy SII and the ICS update is supposed to be released soon. I'll definitely do a GSM reset before upgrading.
Good!
I just had one more question. Will doing it cause any issues with AT&T? Will they be upset or anything like that for me having done it? I know for rooting and other forms of tinkering, they get very upset, so just wanted to confirm.
Actually, neither AT&T nor Samsung get
THAT upset when you root... in largest measure because by your so having done, you've released them from any further warranty liability to you.
[grin] For
them, that's actually a
good thing. So, "upset" is not really the right word. But they definitely don't want you to do it because it really does screw-up their ability to support your use of the phone.
Personally, I never recommend rooting, in any case. Of course I know how to do it, and get really geeky about it. But for what? In the end, all rooting does is make the phone more of a support nightmare... for you, the user. Rooting is for geeks who like to tinker with stuff; who still get a thrill from tearing stuff apart, figuring it out, making it work differently than intended, yadda, yadda, yadda.
I remember when I was maybe 12 -- over 40 years ago -- my ol' man coming home from work and finding me sitting in the middle of the living room floor with every last bit of the big console TV all torn apart and surrounding me. He thought he'd have to buy a new one. But I had it back together and working in no time. And though I got in trouble for it, I learned a lot about TVs. But by starting that young, my point is that I was pretty muchh over the need to tear stuff apart, and see how it works, and make stuff inside work in newer and cooler ways, etc., by the time I was... I dunno... maybe 22 or thereabouts.
So, rooting is just about the last thing I want to do to a phone. Why in the world would I want to add the nightmare of supporting a rooted phone to my already-long list of stuff I can barely keep-up with now? It's just silly. Plus, regular, everyday, non-technical/non-geeky should never attempt to root a phone. It's just stupid! The vast majority of the requests for help from people in the root sections of the various forums are from people who had no business even attempting it in the first place. And the reason they ultimately did is because all the techno-geeks in said forums talked about it like it was no big deal; and the non-technical people weren't sufficiently experienced to realize that they shouldn't have even ventured into such forums.
Rooting a phone just adds to the problems. There's virtually no reason to do it. The biggest reason it got so popular in the first place was because AT&T overreached by not only making the phone so that certain things could not be done to it unless it was rooted, but they also did stupid stuff like limiting where a person could obtain apps to just the Google Play Store (or, more accurately, back then, the Android Market). People wanting to install from more than just there is kinda' what got even non-technical people interested in rooting. AT&T, in that sense, then, made its own troubles. If it had allowed people to install from anywhere right from the outset, then rooting might have remained the purview of just the geeks... where it belongs.
Another thing AT&T did which it shouldn't have done, and which also drew non-techies to the wholly-technical thing called rooting was not allow stock apps to be removed.
If the desktop computer industry has taught us anything since it began in the late '70s, it's that whenever a vendor tries to shove stuff down its products' users' throats, they end-up getting nothing but trouble from said users, who will always resist. Of course, the reason the vendors do it is so that their support burden will be reduced. If the user is allowed to do just anything to his/her computerized device, then said doing could be what causes support problems. It's a vicious circle.
But now I'm digressing. Sorry.
AT&T cares not one whit about "GSM Resets." They're a common part of the everyday use of the system. Don't worry about it one bit.
The real value of the GSM Reset, to the end user, in any case, is not the signal it sends to AT&T. That's just extra niceness; and it may actually not do a single helpful thing regarding the phone's relationship with the AT&T network. It's only really useful if said relationship had somehow gotten weird, thereby necessitating at least
some kind of reset.
The real value of the GSM Reset, to the end user, is how it so completely returns the phone to true factory state... better than any other of the reset methods. That's the only reason I recommend it. If one is going to "reset," then why *****foot around, I always say. If one wants to reset, then s/he should bygod
RESET. Don't do it only halfway. That's my philosophy... hence the reason I pretty much
only use the GSM Reset method. But, hey... that's just me.
I'm excited to try this out since I also use a 32 GB external, and I needed a good way to format it
Actually, the best way to format a 32GB external SD card is, at least at first, in your PC.
Remove the card from the phone, and put it into some kind of adapter that will allow it to plug directly into your Windows PC; and then format the card that way... likely using 32K-sized sectors. And don't do the "quick" method. Go for it. And if you do, plan on having time to go get coffee... maybe even stop by the library. It can take up to a couple or three hours.
Then, once that's done, before you unplug the card from the computer, use the freeware "h2testw" app (you'll find it on Softpedia) to test and verify the card... make sure it's in good shape, that it's really a 32GB card (there are a lot of fakes out there), etc. That, too, takes a while... an hour to two hours.
Then, unplug the card from the PC and put it into the phone and start-up the phone again; and once the phone has settled down (isn't media or virus scanning or anything like that), simply unmount the card and reformat it. Formatting in the phone like that puts the requisite folders on it, and also does some other little internal things so that the phone starts "seeing" the card as something which belongs in it.
Now, that having been said, I must tell you that even if you do it that way, the phone may still somehow become confused about a whoping big 32GB card. Even though Samsung says its phones can handle big 32GB SDHC cards, the truth is that they're most comfortable if the card is 16GB or smaller. Oh, don't get me wrong, they can handle the 32GB cards... but just barely. They become easily confused by them... or at least some phone models do... including the Infuse.
And that, right there, is the reason that I recommend that whatever SD card is gonna' be in that external slot is present during a ROM OS flash (an upgrade to Gingerbread or ICS or whatever). By having the big card in the phone when the ROM is flashed, the phone is initialized with said card being part of said initialization...
...and you wouldn't believe how doing that small and simple thing can make the phone and the 32GB card "play nice" together better over time. It's not foolproof, but it can really help.
So it is not as a means of reformatting the 32GB card that the GSM Reset should be used. The GSM Reset is for resetting the phone to factory state, and sending some interesting reset signals out to the AT&T network along the way. Including the 32GB card in the external slot when you do it is simply so that the phone, when the new OS is flashed to the ROM, will "see" the big 32GB card as something "native" to it, and will play nicer with it over time.
But if all you want to do is format the 32GB card, you may certainly do that without completely GSM Resetting the phone. In fact, I don't recommed GSM resetting the phone just for that purpose. Instead, if all you want to do is properly format the 32GB card, just do it as I've herein earlier described, in your PC first (formatteing to FAT32, with 32K sectors) and then, after that, to make the card so that the phone "sees" it properly, unmount and reformat it again inside the phone. That's all you need to do if all you want to do is format the 32GB card.
Using the "h2testw" utility while the card's still in the PC simply verifies that it's in good shape, that it's in fact the size you think it is (again, the fakes), and it also helps you to see the card's actual read/write speed.
Hope that helps!
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