Help Overnight my phone suddenly bricked itself. HELP!

[cytark]

[My device is a Sprint Galaxy S III, unrooted on STOCK 4.1 (with multi-view)]

So the previous night I plugged my phone into the charger as normal and went to bed. Strangely, when I woke up, my phone was turned off. Curious, I went to turn it back on and waited for it to boot back up, only to have it freeze up in the middle of opening an app. I wasn't worried at this point, but after a battery reseating and restart, it happened again. This time, it froze up on the 'Galaxy S III' boot logo. I tried multiple times to restart, swapping batteries, waiting, and managed somehow to get it to recovery mode. There, I managed to wipe cache and attempt to restart the phone once more. Nothing--it was still frozen on the boot logo. After waiting a while, I tried to get it back into recovery mode, popping out the battery whenever it froze. To my horror, this time, pressing and holding the power button did not get a response from the device.

Mind you in my (roughly) year's worth of time with this phone, I had never dropped it or subjected it to any form of shock or damage. Seriously--the phone looks out-of-the-box-brand-new.

Now the device is bricked(?) I'm thinking it's some sort of hardware defect, but I'm confused because it happened out of nowhere--simply overnight. Nothing I do seems to elicit a response from it and I even tried swapping in a freshly charged battery.

I really don't care about most of the data on the internal storage (cloud sync ftw!) but there are a ton of photos inside that I would give anything to save. Is there any way I could save them? I'd appreciate any input!

TL;DR: Out of nowhere, my 1yr old GSIII suddenly started acting strange and after some troubleshooting bricked itself. Need photos on internal storage.

 

[SebaKL]

Ok, I knot this is not funny, but I laughed at the TL;DR; caption

Anyway...
I wrote about that couple of times, and in fact in a reply to another, similar post today.
Forgive me for "copy & paste".

That sounds like Sudden Death Syndrome (SDS), which usually appear on a 7th or 8th month of usage. Tho it might happen later on.
It's common among early 16GB models, which came with chip type: VTU00M and FwRev: 0x1f.

It is due to faulty spot of NAND on this eMMC, which pretty much hard brick the phone if written to.

From your description, it does sounds like SDS. If your phone is under warranty, this is covered by Samsung and requires mother board change. If the warranty is over, I'm afraid there is not much you can do.

Perhaps look for low cost, damaged unit on eBay? One that works but has cracked screen, etc... so you could use it to swap parts.

As for the data on your internal memory, you can't recover it if you can't power up the device. I'm also afraid it will be gone with the mother board change.

Sorry to read about your predicament. In the future, I highly recommend using Helium (non root) to back up your devices frequently. It also allow to restore that back up to different models, and even tablets.
And once a while power up and Google sync, to back up your images to G+'s private gallery.


cheers

 

[Deleted User]

First of all if you have your photos on the sd card then you can remove the sd card and pop it into to something else to keep your photos.
Second go to your carrier's store and ask them for a repair or something. I'm sure you can get a new phone or something if it wasn't your fault.

 

[Petrah]

The phone is not bricked. Sounds like it could be a hardware issue (or maybe the Playstore updated an app that's causing an issue). If you cannot get the phone to boot up into recovery where you can try a factory reset, I recommend returning the phone.