Samsung Epic 4g Syndicate Rom : Freeze on Boot

Recently my girlfriend (who might start blogging Epic 4G rom reviews here) asked me to root her phone due to the horrendous battery issues the Samsung Epic 4g/Sprint stock rom causes. After searching around a bit, I finally decided upon a one click root posted here. The root went with no snags until I tried to flash Syndicate Rom 1.1.1. The flashing process indicated there were no issues until I rebooted the phone. It got stuck in boot. This presented an unfortunate problem for me. As it turns out, USB support for version 2.5 of Clockworkmod on the Epic 4g is not functional. Through a very complicated process of pulling the sd card, putting it in my HTC Evo, copying the files through that, and putting the sd card back into her phone, I tried different downloads of Syndicate Rom with none of them working.

Then it dawned on me...

The Ext 4 filesystem was introduced into Android at version 2.2 the version that Syndicate builds on. After some research, I discovered that Clockworkmod doesn't support Ext 4 until version 3. With that, I searched for Clockworkmod 3 for the Epic 4g. I flashed version 3.1 and reflashed Syndicate Rom and all was well.

There was much rejoicing

On a related note, I also discovered that if you format the Epic 4g sd card from Clockworkmod 3, it runs much faster. I can only guess that this is because the sd card is originally formatted with Samsung's proprietary file system, RFS (robust file system... see last entry here).