Upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich - Issues

I tried to upgrade my Samsung Galaxy S 2 from Gingerbread to Ice cream sandwich, and I ran into a couple of issues that I thought I should share with people.

I have Bell as the carrier in Canada and I was using Samsung Kies and a USB connection to do the upgrade.

My desktop was a Windows 7 64 bit machine and a laptop with Windows Vista 32 bit.

First problem - Windows 7 64 bit attempt

I was getting a message in Kies: "Your device does not support software upgrading via Kies"

I called Bell and Samsung, both said I should try taking out battery, hard reset, etc. None of these worked.

The solution to this problem is NOT using Windows 7. I moved to my laptop and I was not getting this message anymore and was able to proceed with upgrade right away.



Second Problem - Stuck with "Installing Applications" screen

Once the update is complete, you have to restart your phone. You will get a screen on saying "Installing Applications". I was stuck here for long time..(1 hour or more).

What I ended up doing is taking out my microsd card and trying it again. I was still getting the same message.

I was still able to use the home screen button to go to Managing Apps section where you can see Running, Downloaded, etc apps. I noticed that for some reason I had very little space (hard disk) on the system drive. It was not using the Phone memory. So I decided to delete some big apps to create space.

Eventually after deleting about 200 mb worth of apps, I restarted and was able to get past the "Installing Applications" screen right away.



So lesson is to make sure you have System space available before the upgrade. You can either uninstall big apps or move them to your MicroSD card before the upgrade. If you are in the middle of this problem, I recommend playing with the Home screen button during the stuck screen and deleting apps and restarting.

Good luck. Please share your problem and solutions in comments.

Thanks