How To Fix A Galaxy S3 Won’t Turn On [Troubleshooting Guide]
We receive hundreds of emails each week from our readers reporting–many actually complain–about the problems they encountered with their phone. In one of the emails, our reader, a Samsung Galaxy S3 owner, said his phone was fully-charged but about an hour later, he found it turned off. The worst part is, he couldn’t power it on.
What happened? Well, even Samsung engineers couldn’t answer that question without performing some troubleshooting procedures.
In this post, we will attempt to troubleshoot the phone exhausting all possible ways to bring it back to life.
How To Fix A Galaxy S3 Won’t Turn On
Step 1: Hit the Power button
Yes, please do. This is the first thing you should do when troubleshooting a problem like this. Don’t just do it once or twice but do it many times just to make sure that there is indeed a problem with the powering on of the phone.
Step 2: Remove the battery and hold the Power button
Yes, I’m serious. Actually, somebody told me I was a fool when he saw me pull the battery out of his phone and hit the power button. He said, there is no way I can turn the phone on without the battery. That’s true, but we’re not actually trying to power on the phone at this point. Rather, we’re trying to drain electricity stored in electronic components inside the phone. After this, place the battery back and hit the power button again. If the phone stays dead after that, proceed to the next step.
Step 3: Boot to Safe Mode
To rule out the possibility of a third-party application preventing the phone from booting up normally, you need to boot it to Safe Mode. It will run on pre-loaded apps and nothing else. So, if it were an app causing the problem, you would know by doing this.
- Press and hold the Power button.
- Immediately after the Samsung Galaxy S3 screen appears, release the Power button then press and hold the Volume Down key.
- The phone would restart and the Safe Mode text will be visible in the lower-left corner of the screen.
Consider yourself lucky if you can go this far. If this is the case, then you can commence the search for the rogue app and uninstall it. Start your search from the most recent installation. The rule of thumb is to disable suspected apps first and attempt to boot normally. The problem has already been fixed at this point.
In case you cannot boot to Safe Mode, proceed with the next step.
Step 4: Boot to Recovery Mode and wipe cache partition
Booting to Recovery Mode can be already be considered a desperate measure yet it is not a guarantee you can fix the problem. In fact, there is no guarantee you can even boot to this mode. But try to follow these steps:
- Press and hold the Volume Up, Home, and Power buttons.
- When the phone vibrates, release the Power button but continue holding the other two until Android System Recovery screen appears.
- Use the Volume Down button to highlight ‘wipe cache partition’ and press the Power button to select it.
- The phone will reboot automatically after the cache partition was wiped out.
At this point, if you can’t boot to Recovery Mode no matter how much you tried, then we have already narrowed down the problem. It’s either your battery is totally busted or your phone’s Power switch has a problem.
Step 5: Try a different or new battery
Borrow from a friend or just buy a new battery so you can test if it was really the battery that caused the problem. If you bought a new one and you found out it wasn’t the battery, at least, you now have a spare. Of course, make sure the battery is compatible with the Galaxy S3 and make it a point to fully-charge before using it. If your phone powers on after a battery swap, then problem solved.
Step 6: Seek help from a technician
In case you’ve tried a different battery and the phone still refuses to turn on, it’s time you brought it back to the store or to a shop where it can be physically check thoroughly. If proven defective by a technician, a replacement unit may be provided for you of it could be repaired. I have a suspicion it’s a Power switch issue especially if the phone don’t respond when you pressed it.
I hope this helps.
The ripple current may be 1000Hz or 10Khz or even 60Khz.
Following “the standard” means nothing as excessive isn’t specific to merely the peak-to-peak ripple current.
Nobody is bringing PSU’s to market that don’t meet the de facto standard because no retailer would procure them.
So your analogy is pure gibberish.
If you want to know why I’m so annoyed with you, go to school for engineering be it electrical/electronic, computer or even radio.
The average person who thinks they have tech knowledge including your expert reviewers are painfully ignorant if not outright inherently stupid. If they had a degree in engineering, they would be doing something that pays a lot better.
Anyone can solder some parts together and build a regulator or a stereo amplifier or a radio transceiver. Knowing how it works at the quantum and mathematical level is a whole other world which is why I stated, your opinions are worthless as are those of your “experts”. Anyone that actually works with any electrical devices on a regular basis knows why.
Every single electrical and electronic device is it’s own little universe and it’s impossible to say anything definitive without running it through the gauntlet of tests on various test equipment.
Just the time involved to review the data sheets of all the IC’s and semiconductors in a PSU?
You need at least 2 years of college, an A.A. and another year minimum working in power supply systems to be able to competently engineer something seemingly as basic as a computer PSU.
Nobody reviewing them has any of that because if they did as I already said, they would have a much better career.
I haven’t written anything about directly connecting audio or video equipement to a PC PSU. This is not what a PC PSU is made for. It is made for powering PC motherboards (and other PC components like drives and fans). Of course the motherboards have additional filters and regulators.
But imho you cannot call something garbage if it obeys the standard it should obey and this standard is ATX in the case of PC PSUs.
And I am not an engineer and I never tried to present myself as an engineer, but I read a lot of PSU reviews, including professional reviews, so I know that high-quality PC PSUs obey the ATX standard within a very good margin (or all these reviewers lie, which I think is highly unlikely). IT IS UNFAIR TO JUDGE THEM BY A HIGHER STANDARD, because the ATX standard is thorough enough for what PC PSUs are meant to be used. It would be technically possible to design them with even less ripple current, but this would just make it more expensive and maybe too big to fit into normal ATX cases. If you want and universal PSU, you can buy an universal PSU, so there is no reason to make an ATX-PSU universal.
So your complaints about all ATX PSUs are like complaining about a road surface which is not smooth enough if you drive 100 km/h on this road, although the road has a speed limit of 30 km/h.
I have a Samsung S3 (GT-I9300) which doesn’t do anything if I press the power button. It also doesn’t show that it is charging when I connect it to the charger. The LED also doesn’t turn on anymore.
It all started when I tried to wake up may phone from standby and it didn’t react. After this I measured 0V on the battery with my multimeter, first I tried to recharge it with the phone + charger, but this didn’t work, but after I used a universal Li-Ion charger (where you put the battery directly into the charger) it recharged to 4.16V, which is much more than the rating of 3.8V.
I tried all the steps here and also the following additional things:
– connecting the phone to the PC: it is not recognized in Device Manager, Kies or Odin.
– Downlaod mode (Volume down + Home + Power)
– short circuit the power button.
– I measured the current: after I put the battery in, it rises to 3.6-3.8mA, then it drops to about 0.34-0.45 mA and stays at that level. When i press the power button, the current rises to about 170-200 mA and stays there as long as I have the power button pressed, but then it goes back again to about 0.34-0.45 mA. If I remove the battery and have the charger connected, I measure about 0.01mA between the + and – battery connector.
– I left the motherboard in my oven at 230°C for 5 minutes, because I read on the Internet that the reason might be a problem with the soldering of the power IC, which is a BGA chip and BGA chip soldering problems can sometimes solved this way.
– I also measured the voltage of the battery in different conditions: it is now at 4.13V when I just put it in the phone and it drops to 4.05V when I press the power button, so the battery is probably not the problem.
Is there anything else I can try? I would be satisfied if I it is only recognized by the PC so I can save my data, I will get a new phone soon anyway…
Smartphones have to be as thin as possible, so there is probably not enough space for classic style plugs and sockets…
As for PC power supplies: only the cheap ones are garbage, high-quality PSUs obey the ATX standard which allows a ripple of max. 50 mV at 3.3V/5V and 120 mV at 12V. high-quality PSUs have much less than this with all load scenarios (including unrealistic ones like having the maximum current on one rail and almost no current at the other rails).
Thanks for your help.I’ve tried all the tips but could not get past the s3 screen. Once i saw i couldn’t get in any of those modes i tried pressing the power button one last time and surprisingly it started!
Hi. I have this same power button reset issue on battery insertion. To get the gs3 to stay on in download mode without resetting:
– connect the phone by usb to the computer
– enter download mode by pressing home and the volume down button
– once the download screen appears, immediately remove the battery
– the phone should stay in download mode without the battery inserted
i cant access recovery mode because the phone resets too quick. hopefully flashing will finally fix the reboot.
just another minor workaround
I’m having the same issue, except that the phone does turn on but the screen stays black. Don’t know what to do. It simply fell off my lap while I was seating at work, onto a carpeted floor about 2 feet down.
What worked for me… I got a new SIM card from Verizon. Then I removed my SD card. That was causing problems for me.
thank u s0o0o much .. it works………. (Y) (Y)
none of these steps are working, my phone just died and it doesnt react for anything, would the technicans fix it without deleting all of the informations? I am really concerned about that… I need actually everything whats on my phone, Ive treated it like my calendar, all my contacts and everything is there, cant leave it like that, please help