How to unroot and unbrick Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini

If you've had enough of a custom rom and want to go back to your stock TouchWiz rom but haven't made a nandroid backup, or you want to unroot you phone, or you happen to be stuck on a bootloop and Recovery mode is not working, then follow this simple step-by-step guide on achieving all of this.

If you've owned an Android Samsung smartphone before, you might be familiar with the procedure. If you're new to Samsung devices, this post will guide you how to unroot or unbrick your Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini within a few minutes.

Prerequisites:

To succeed in unrooting/unbricking your Galaxy S4 Mini you would need the following things:

• A Windows PC
• Samsung USB Drivers - Samsung USB Drivers
• Odin3 - Click here to download.
• Firmware package SamMobile website

Unrooting/Unbricking steps:

Step 1:

Download the USB drivers if you haven't and install them on your computer. You can also just install Samsung Kies then connect your phone and it would install all of the left-out drivers that you might not have, but be sure to close all Kies processes when you are ready to use Odin, otherwise you may experience conflicts.

Step 2:

Download the firmware from SamMobile website. Head into their firmware section which can be found in their top navigation menu and search for your model e.g. I9190, I9192, I9195. It will then display a list of available firmwares for your model, so download the one that matches your Country/Carrier, the firmware is usually hosted at Hotfile so it will take you there.
Note: In order to be able to download from SamMobile, you need to register an account so do that before you download.
The downloaded file will be a huge zip file approximately ~900MB in size, now extract it with a software such as WinRAR or 7Zip and you should see a .tar.md5 file inside the extracted folder.

Step 3:

Download the Odin3 program to your computer and start it up.

Step 4:

Power off your Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini completely. If you're stuck on a bootloop (e.g. the phone is displaying the boot animation over and over forever), then take off the battery and put it back in.
Now begin to hold the Volume down + Home + Power buttons at the same time and you should be in Download mode as seen in the first photo above.

Step 5:

Press the volume up button to continue and make your Galaxy S4 Mini ready to download. At this point your Windows pc may recognize some more drivers and install whatever is left-out.

Step 6:

Connect your Galaxy S4 Mini to your computer while it is in Download mode. I would highly recommend that you connect it to a USB port that is from the back of your computer because usually people experience problems such as the device not being detected or FAIL messages if using one of the ports from the front side. Also be sure to still have the Odin program opened, and you should see in the COM box your phone being detected:

Step 7:

Now remember that firmware which you extracted earlier? Click on the PDA button and you will be taken to the browsing window, now locate the .tar.md5 file and open it:

Step 8:

After opening the file, you may experience a small freeze in the Odin program but don't worry, it is checking the MD5 and that could take up to 1 minute depending on your computer, so just be patient and do not panic, the program will restore itself back to it's normal state and say that MD5 check is successful:

Step 9:

At this point, you are 100% ready to begin the process. Just make sure that the only options that are enabled are "Auto Reboot" and "F. Reset Time".

Step 10:

Click that Start button and it will begin transferring the stock firmware onto the S4 Mini. Please note that it is a large file and it could take up to 5, 6 minutes or even more. You should be given a loading bar on the Odin program aswell as on your phone to track the process.

Step 11:

Once it is done, you should see a green box on the Odin program that says PASS! and your phone should automatically reboot. Now after it reboots, you may notice that you have your old settings and old installed applications, it is highly recommended that you now do a data wipe to clean out everything from your old firmware to get rid of possible nasty bugs.

Step 12:

Power off your phone, hold Volume up + Power + Home buttons at the same time and your phone should boot into Recovery mode.

Step 13:

Choose Wipe data/factory reset and be patient for the phone to wipe out everything. Once it is done, reboot your phone and you should be in the Setup Wizard as if you just bought your S4 Mini.