How to flash a rom on an entirely blacked out phone (s5 mini G800H) Three or four months ago, whenever I tried to connect to Play Store or my gmail account etc. my phone returned a network related error message, which happened after I made a factory reset. Some games encountered errors too.

I tried to flash a rom from sd card, but it did not install even though it said that installation was successful. Odin doesn't recognize my phone, and there is no root, so rom installer won't work because I can't install custom recovery without root (correct me if I'm wrong).

In this desperate situation of mine is there at least something I can do (except buying a new phone)?
Custom Recovery can be installed without root.
If you have Samsung Kies running while the phone is connected to PC, chances are high that it interferes with Odin. Disable Kies

Try the following method that makes use of adb commands through a commmad prompt from PC instead of using Odin.


Download TWRP recovery for S5 Mini from here -> TWRP Recovery
Make sure USB drivers are installed.
Download 15 sec ADB installer
Rename the downloaded img file to "recovery.img" and move this to the ADB folder that was downloaded earlier. Make sure you have ADB.exe, fastboot.exe and the recovery.img in the same directory
Enable developer options and USB Debugging in your device
Connect the device to PC. Make sure device is detected. If not re-install the correct USB drivers.
Once device is detected, open a command prompt and change location to the ADB directory. Issue the command "adb devices". This should give your device ID as the output.


Executive the following commands carefully:

"adb reboot bootloader" - the device will reboot in fastboot mode

Once device shows up fast boot screen, type " fastboot devices " and make sure device ID is listed

Type "fastboot flash recovery recovery.img" . this installs the TWRP image into the device. If successful you will see an Okay message in command prompt.

Issue command "fastboot reboot" and wait for device to reboot normally. Once this is done you can try the key combination to boot into recovery. If everything went well you should be greeted with the TWRP recovery instead of the stock Android recovery.

Once this is done. You can root your phone/install the ROM.zip file using the TWRP Recovery

Hope this helps.