Hi folks,

Trying to assist a friend with a JH7 Captivate S (i897) to do a stock Froyo update.

From my limited reading it appears that a Win7 x64 PC is not a good choice for Kies Mini, and Samsung officially discourages the use of Kies for W7 x64. (W7 x64 is what I've got for better or worse)

[ FYI - Tried installing Kies Mini 11011_4 under a VirtualBox Win XP x32 guest; it actually crashes the guest VM during driver install phase. That, and USB pass-through in VirtualBox 4.1.x is not 100% transparent. Makes me a bit nervous to flash the phone using a VM guest. ]

So, a couple of questions:

Q1) Is KB1 the last official (Froyo) release from Samsung? (sorry for the lamer question)

I'm savvy enough to boot a Linux CD Distro and use Heimdall if necessary, so...

Q2) Anybody here ever use Heimdall for a stock install?

Q3) My (poor) understanding is that ROMs for Odin/Heimdall are slightly kanged versions of whatever Kies/MiniKies would normally download from Samsung - is that correct?

Q4) That being the case - and assuming I can find it (KB1?) for download someplace (where?) - has anybody published MD5 sigs for these (slightly kanged) "official" Samsung ROMs?


Any opinions or expansion on the above would be welcomed. I'm basically looking for a minimal-risk stock upgrade. As the phone is not mine, I'd prefer to avoid a multi-day adventure. (If the phone was mine, it would have been rooted a long time ago)


eu1

[ Edit ]

Answered some of my questions with more digging.

- It appears that UCKB2 appeared on some late-shipped Captivates.

- This XDA thread seems to be what I am looking for, although I suppose that the phone currently (JH7) doesn't have a Froyo bootloader, so I might experience some ... eh ... "kinks"

as I said before, comments are welcome.


.

 

First - happy new year!

Epilogue:

Got it done - eventually - by punting (finding a WinXp x32 box); only took me 5 hours end-to-end. (Backup user data, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, succeed, Restore apps & user data)

Under Win Xp SP3 x32, Kies Mini 11011_4 (the download link at this Samsung Page) installs, performs driver installs, downloads and installs something called "Windows Media Format 11", updates itself to 11051_4, then re-installs some more drivers. This only requires restarting the phone three times in two different modes and rebooting the WinXp PC twice. I sure am glad Samsung made it easy for us.


On Win7 Pro x64, Kies Mini goes through much the same process (but without the "Windows Media Format 11" install); the drivers all appear to install correctly; but alas, when Kies Mini finally is happy with itself, it fails to recognize the device in Download mode. I also tried the One-Click java/jar/Heimdall install with Win7 x64, but got stopped out with the same Java errors mentioned in here in that XDA thread

Attempting a USB pass-through to a Win XP x32 VM guest (VirtualBox v4.1.6) is completely execrable experience - any attempt to install drivers results in an immediate VM crash - this applies to the Kies Mini USB drivers and also the Heimdall zadig drivers as well.

FWIW, when Kies Mini runs (successfully), it drops it's download payload into a single file at

C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Temp\<something>.tmp

This gets unpacked into a tar file and a .dll, both of which can be copied to another location while the flashing to the Captivate is in progress:

Code (Text):

1.  
2. ----------+ 1 user None 193046928 Dec 31 15:44 1A1.tmp
3.  
4. which unpacks to:
5.  
6. ----------+ 1 user None 300813312 Dec 31 15:45 I897UCKB1-homeBinary.tar
7. ----------+ 1 user None    270336 Dec 31 15:45 SS_DL.dll
8.  
9. MD5s:
10.  
11. 73226a734d5d04bea9f998ca63290dc8 *I897UCKB1-homeBinary.tar
12. 95e7395c12897fc3a155bc3e66e2edbb *SS_DL.dll
13.  
14. contents of I897UCKB1-homeBinary.tar:
15.  
16. -rwxr-xr-x+ 1 user None   1363968 Nov  7  2010 cache.rfs
17. -rwxr-xr-x+ 1 user None 281862144 Jan 31  2011 factoryfs.rfs
18. -rwxr-xr-x+ 1 user None  12582912 Jan 31  2011 modem.bin
19. -rwxr-xr-x+ 1 user None   5001024 Jan 31  2011 zImage
20.  
21.  

I don't recognize the format of the 1A1.tmp file - it clearly must be compressed, as it unpacks from 193 MB to 300+ MB - but the lead-off bytes don't seem to contain any recognizable magic numbers.


FWIW, here's the USB VID/PID pairs I noted for the JH7 phone in various modes:

VID / PID

04E8 / 681D Mass Storage Device
04E8 / 6601 Gadget Serial (phone in Download Mode)
04E8 / 681C SAMSUNG Android USB Composite Device (or Composite ADB Interface)
04E8 / 68A9 SAMSUNG Android USB Composite Device (USB Debugging)
04E8 / 6877 Portable Devices -> MTP USB Device (Kies Firmware Mode)


Happy new years ... and thanks for all the help!

cheers

eu1