My Galaxy S (US/TMobile) periodically hangs -- touch screens and buttons unresponsive. Eventually reboots, typically works briefly, then hangs again. Appears to be triggered by apps which access the internal user partition, such as Files, Maps/Navigation, and Keyring. However, Astro can read the internal partition w/o difficulty.
Further details:
Firmware version: 2.2
Baseband version: T959UVKB5
Kernel version: 2.6.32.9
Build number: FROYO.UVKB5
Symptoms appeared only after I tried to change the volume label on the internal user partition using mlabel under linux. After a couple of hangs, I reformatted this partition (using the phone), and restored the data via USB. At this point, Files had difficulty seeing the filesystem on the internal user partition (but Astro had no problem), and starting any of Files/Keyring/Maps (but not Astro) hung the phone as above. This behavior appeared to be reproducible -- reformatting would fix things until I started one of the above programs.
Then tried (reformatting and) reinstalling Maps/Navigation (svox) and Keyring, and not restoring any data. This worked fine for a couple of weeks, although I don't believe I actually ran Navigation during that time.
Yesterday when trying to Navigate, all the bad behavior came back -- and GPS was clearly not working, a problem I had also had before. (Standard symptoms: GPS location frozen, and/or position given only using cell towers.) Pulling the battery did not immediately fix things; didn't try reformatting while on the road. However, after repeated battery pulls and running the Samsung GPS fix (GPSRestoreSamsung), the phone began working properly again, and appears to be fine, so I've done nothing further.
So now I'm not sure which problem(s) I'm actually having. I had thought this was a low-level disk formatting issue caused by mlabel -- or possibly a bad block -- which only shows up in certain cases, although I would have thought that reformatting would have fixed that. But yesterday's behavior suggests that this might be purely a GPS issue, and a combination of the Samsung GPS fix and a battery pull is sufficient. I can live with that, but am surprised that everything else hangs, a behavior I have not seen reported elsewhere. Or perhaps I'm having both a formatting and a GPS issue...
Any advice would be much appreciated. I have not yet tried a factory reset, since some combination of reformatting/reinstalling/resetting GPS/pulling the battery does appear to fix the problem. But it would be nice to know what the problem is -- and which of the above actions is fixing it.
Thanks,
Cilantro
