Samsung Galaxy smartphones are the most popular Android smartphones on the market. They have the highest market share and, in most cases, an easily unlockable bootloader. One thing that is not always easy to find on Samsung Galaxy phones is Odin which is used to downgrade, update or restore the phone. The firmware that are installed with Odin are like the factory images for Google Pixel, simply inserted in a .tar file and made easy to use by a GUI tool instead of the fastboot command terminal.
SamFirm is a free tool for Microsoft Windows PC made by the senior member zxz0O0 that helps you download the firmware and then install them with Odin on any Samsung Galaxy smartphone or tablet. Although it has been deprecated, it still works until today. This tool will download firmware files directly from Samsung servers with all the necessary files. It is very simple and easy to download the firmware with this tool. All you need is your model number and your CSC, below we’ll show you how.
How to download official firmware for Samsung Galaxy to be installed via Odin with SamFirm
- Download Phone INFO ★ Samsung ★ from the Google Play Store. This is to find out which CSC value is currently active. If you already know what it is, go to step 3.
- Open Samsung phone info and go to the CSC Code tab. It should show an option that says Active CSC code . Remember that this code is 3 characters you will need it for the next step.
- To download official firmware for Samsung Galaxy, download and install Microsoft Visual C ++ 2008 Redistributable Package (x86) and Microsoft Visual C ++ 2010 Redistributable Package (x86) on the PC. These are necessary for SamFirm to download the firmware.
- Download SamFirm v0.3.6. This is the latest build and works to download all Samsung Galaxy firmware. This program requires Windows, like Odin, so keep that in mind as you try to download these files.
- Extract and open the zip file you just downloaded. This will contain all the files needed to make SamFirm work.
- Open SamFirm. Once opened, be sure to select the Auto option. This option will automatically download the firmware so you don’t need the build number every time you download.
- Enter your model number where it says, Model. This will start with SM-. You need to make sure you include SM or it will not download your files.
- Next, under the region section, enter the CSC value we discussed earlier. Then click Check Update. This will find the latest update for your device. If no update is shown, this could be due to the fact that the manager you are using does not use Samsung servers for updates and therefore does not store anything. In this case, try searching for the firmware you need on AndroidFileHost. It is usually loaded there.
- Click Download and select the path to the files. This will start the download and decryption. This can take some time depending on the speed of your network and the CPU. SamFirm will tell you that decryption is over in the log window when the file is ready to be extracted and used for flashing.
These Odin-installable firmware are sometimes hard to find, so it’s nice to see a developer step up and create a program to help find what people need.
