Help Phone Rebooting Itself Over and Over (Not Rooted)

[mattbe213]

Hi. I've had bad luck finding help online so far, so I figured I would come here to see if I could get some help.

Since last night at around 8 PM, my phone was rebooting itself. It would reboot every few minutes or so. I have absolutely no idea why this began happening. The only thing that changed about the phone was that I took my case off of it yesterday, but I don't see that being the problem. Sometimes before it reboots, it will pop up the boot menu (Power Off, Restart, volume controls, etc...) but that menu will quickly go away on its own, and the phone will restart.

When I pull the battery and replace it, the phone will power back up without me even touching the power button, leading me to think that this could be an issue. The reboots have happened so fast that the phone restarts WHILE it is rebooting. And then it will stay on for five minutes or so before going black and needing a restart.

Please help!

-Matt

 

[Frisco]

Hi. I've had bad luck finding help online so far, so I figured I would come here to see if I could get some help.

Since last night at around 8 PM, my phone was rebooting itself. It would reboot every few minutes or so. I have absolutely no idea why this began happening. The only thing that changed about the phone was that I took my case off of it yesterday, but I don't see that being the problem. Sometimes before it reboots, it will pop up the boot menu (Power Off, Restart, volume controls, etc...) but that menu will quickly go away on its own, and the phone will restart.

When I pull the battery and replace it, the phone will power back up without me even touching the power button, leading me to think that this could be an issue. The reboots have happened so fast that the phone restarts WHILE it is rebooting. And then it will stay on for five minutes or so before going black and needing a restart.

Please help!

-Matt

Hello Matt. Sorry to see you're having the oft reported S3 self-rebooting issue.

It's fixable.

- Facebook and other 3rd party syncing apps can loop services into overload, causing the rebooting.

- Factory Data Reset is needed to clear rogue services doing that loop.

Once in a while we see success with a mere "live battery pull," wherein the device is powered up and running and the battery is removed, then just put back in (some like to remove the sd and SIM cards just for good measure ).

If you do a back up and restore following the reset, be very wary of importing the issue right back into the device.. in other words, don't back up apps and widgets. Instead, install them one at a time and test for a while.

 

[mattbe213]

Hey Frisco. Thanks for the informative reply! I wish Samsung would just e-mail this back to customers when they have an issue like this! But I do have one question. When you say "Factory Data Reset" do you mean wipe the whole phone? If so, would it be bad to backup things like messages and call logs? Those are really the only things that I don't want to lose.

Thanks in advance!

-Matt