Samsung SM-B313E/D - Flashing software and getting out of a fix

It all started with this tweet:

That’s a Samsung SM-B313E/D. I forgot the password and it was actually really disturbing because I couldn’t depend on myself to remember the several other passwords when I forgot a 4-digit password for an old phone.

That aside, I needed a way to fix this. There are several tutorials to do this on the Internet. A selection:

Tutorial 1

Tutorial 2

Tutorial 3

Tutorial 4

There was something peculiar about each of these ones. The phone that I am talking about is a really cheap phone (~ Rs. 2000 or USD 40) and thus there were no “high quality” tutorials for this, as one might expect for a smart phone like the Sony Xperia L or a Nexus.

All the tutorials showed more or less the same tutorial, but I was still not completely sure that I would be able to recover my phone using the tutorial. Also, being pretty paranoid myself, I saw no reason why they would not just ask you to run some EXE file on your Windows computer with administrator privileges and hide a virus inside that.

I decided to take the plunge, mainly because I had run out of options. Samsung Service Centers are not the best places to go to in the world if you want quick resolution.

The process was simple.

1. Install the Spreadtrum Driver Package
2. Download a .pac file which has the software packet for this phone
3. Use a software to flash this PAC file onto the phone (I found an XDA thread about this)

The verdict is that I was able to get the phone working once again! It works fine now, and there was really nothing off about the tutorial. I used Tutorial number 4 from the videos listed above. But for some reason the ResearchDownload tool linked in that video didn’t work for me. So I went to their website and downloaded the latest one.

Another weird thing was that the PAC File that I recieved said that the software was for SC6530_SAMSUNG: b310e, but it worked for B313E/D. This was one thing that I was most fearful about: that the wrong software would fry the phone. It didn’t! I guess the software packages are close enough replicas of each other to not make much of a difference.

There’s certainly a difference in the software packages. In the earlier software that was there on the phone, I could select multiple message and mark them as read. Now I can’t, I can only delete them. So, the software has definitely changed.

This was a success story. My heart was racing when the SPD Flash Tool was doing it’s thing, but it worked out fine!

Some notes:

1. Tutorial 4 from above
2. SPD Flash Tool’s website: http://spdflashtool.com/ (I think this is the official one, but I can’t really be sure. There are several mirrors of this software out there)
3. The PAC file and the drivers from Tutorial 4 above worked for me.

I used a Windows 8 computer.

I realized that I should probably put a disclaimer here, just to be safe.

Note: A typical disclaimer. I am copying text from the MIT License that absolves me of any responsibility in case of loss incurred from doing something that I state worked for me above.

THE TUTORIAL IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS
FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR
COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER
IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN
CONNECTION WITH THE TUTORIAL OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE TUTORIAL.