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I have a Samsung Galaxy S2. To update it the official way, you need Windows and Samsung Kies (an application that does the updating). The unofficial way lets you do it with a Linux-native application called Heimdell. To start things off, you need to put the phone in "download mode" which involves restarting the phone, holding the home and volume-down buttons while turning it on. I'm fine up to that point.

The problem comes when plugging it into Ubuntu. I plug it in, Heimdell doesn't see anything and can't continue.

Additionally, lsusb stalls for a very long time and then fails to show the Samsung. If I unplug the phone lsusb works just fine. The phone seems to be the problem, for some reason.

I've tried this with an Ubuntu laptop (on 64bit 2.6.38 - just as the desktop) and it registers fine. lsusb works as expected but Heimdall has some other issues.

I want to get this working on my desktop because then I can let VirtualBox take the USB device and I can flash it with Odin (another tool from Samsung). But as it is, the system doesn't see the phone, so I can't pass it off.

Where should I be looking for debugging information?

Watching dmesg | tail for a while shows something like this:

[167976.600142] usb 6-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 4
[167991.709360] usb 6-1: device descriptor read/64, error -110
[168006.928436] usb 6-1: device descriptor read/64, error -110
[168007.158227] usb 6-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 5
[168022.267425] usb 6-1: device descriptor read/64, error -110
[168037.486529] usb 6-1: device descriptor read/64, error -110
[168037.717116] usb 6-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 6
[168043.132523] usb 6-1: device not accepting address 6, error -84
[168043.252408] usb 6-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 7

The longer I watch it, the more of those messages I see.

/var/log/udev doesn't show anything new when plugging it in.

2 Answers 2

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I've found my samsung intercept is very finicky about USB.
Try another cable? Try another port? Try rebooting? On some laptops it'll only work -sometimes-.

This isn't necessary an answer, but it's just too long to put as a comment. Please look into whether the following will work-

My suggestion is to avoid using Download mode altogether. USB is too finicky and it's not worth the risk. This is what I would do on the intercept. You should see if you can't find something like flashimg that will allow you to flash directly from the phone.

  1. Get temporary root. (use gingerbreak?) if you don't already have.
  2. Flash Clockwork recovery using flashimg.bin
  3. Flash update using clockwork recovery.
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  • Turns out this was my desktop's fault. Plugged it into my other half's laptop and it was fine. So either something I've done to break it or there's just a weird USB chipset conflict. Either way, I'm happy now.
    – Oli
    Dec 29, 2011 at 10:47
  • Yes.. Samsung + Usb + android == finicky as hell it seems.
    – user606723
    Dec 29, 2011 at 21:09
  • Switching the cable worked for me! I would like to know why though.
    – z7sg
    Nov 9, 2013 at 12:17
  • user606723: It's not a solution when someone is trying to redirect USB device to a virtual machine with Windows & Odin. I also find the problem with Heimdall's unsupported model, then trying to use Odin in a Qemu or VirtualBox VM. May 22, 2015 at 14:40
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Heimdall is the open-source alternative for Odin and not for KIES.

Since Ubuntu has a default behaviour with some USB devices it's a good thing to overwrite this behaviour like Google describe here for the android developers http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/device.html

keep in mind that udev is far more important than any application and flashing a device is an extremely risky stuff.

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