Samsung Galaxy S – Reclaim the Missing Three Button Modes

No doubt if you have been following this blog you would have been aware of my problems with the missing recovery and download modes (AKA three button modes or three button combinations). Thankfully, Samsung Canada released a solution today which users of the international version of the Samsung Galaxy S (model number GT-I9000) can utilise.

Basically, you need to hack the registry so Kies believes your phone is a Bell branded model from Canada (which is a GT-I9000M). Before you do, you should uninstall any lag fixes (such as the Voodoo lag fix) so you don’t end up with a device that can no longer boot. Also, you need to have your phone connected to Kies before updating the registry (otherwise if you connect your phone afterwards your changes will be overwritten or superseded).

Final word of warning, you would be best placed to backup the [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Samsung] branch of the registry just in case you hose something.

Warning – proceed at your own risk! Disclaimers go here!

So anyway, you need to make the following changes to your registry:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Samsung\Kies\DeviceDB\{x}] - where {x} is an
entry containing the following keys:

"SoftwareRevision"="I9000UGJG9/I9000BMCJG9/I9000UGJG9/I9000UGJG9"
"HIDSWVER"="I9000UGJG9/I9000BMCJG9/I9000UGJG9/I9000UGJG9"
"DEVCONINFO"=" {update the two instances where the four forward slash
separated values exist with  "I9000UGJG9/I9000BMCJG9/I9000UGJG9/I9000UGJG9"}
"ProductCode"="GT-I9000HKDBMC"
"Model Name"="GT-I9000M"

Bear in mind you may have as few as two entries under [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Samsung\Kies\DeviceDB] but others may have a significantly greater number. To save yourself some trouble you could try editing the key with the highest value of {x} where the values requiring updates are not blank. Otherwise, you could simply rename the [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Samsung\Kies] key to [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Samsung\Kies1], relaunch Kies and accept any prompts to update the registry (which will rebuild that registry branch) which should then leave you with just two entries. However, this could break things like backups and syncing which I have not tested.

Once completed, you should be able to execute a search for latest firmware and you should get the following screen:

Kies - Canada JH2 Upgrade

It’s pretty much smooth sailing from there after you click the upgrade button and follow the wizard through as it downloads the firmware, uploads it to your device and then reboots the device. Once you have verified that the phone is functional, try turning off the phone and then attempt to engage either three button mode. To refresh your memory, these modes can be invoked as follows:

1. Power off the phone completely,
2. Hold down the home button and either:
   1. the volume up button (for bootloader mode), or
   2. the volume down button (for system recovery mode),
3. Then hold down the power button whilst holding down the other two buttons,
4. Let go of the power button once you see activity on the screen then let go of the two other buttons.

Hopefully your device should now have both three button modes fully functional.

The next question that people may have is “where to from here?”

Personally, I wanted to flash back to the original JG4 stock firmware that was on the phone out of the box. I won’t go into the details (I might write up another blog with how to do it) but it involves sourcing the original firmware file, a PIT file corresponding to the firmware (which I guess stands for Partition Information Table) and a tool called Odin.

Use of Odin is not for the faint of heart and can result in a bricked phone, so if you don’t feel confident don’t do it!

I hope this helps people out there that have been crying out for a solution from Samsung, especially those who do not have solutions native to their devices requiring the above described hack.