I have been running a nightly build of Cyanogen Mod 12.1 on my Galaxy S3 without issues for some time now. I never bothered to update it because it is a development phone and the version I was on (can't remember which) was working fine.
This morning I powered on the phone and the launcher would not launch. All I saw was a blank screen with my background image and no status bar. Using adb logcat I was able to see that there was activity on the device.
I was also able to access the device via adb shell. Running top I could see that system_server was the only thing really consuming CPU, ~30% or so.
Pushing one of my applications from Android Studio resulted in the appropriate log data but none of the UI ever displayed. I ended up booting into recovery and clearing the cache and dalvik which only made things worse.
After rebooting to the system I was presented with the "Optimizing apps" dialog which seemed to go at a normal pace but then it got to "Finishing boot" and the progress bar just spun for over 30 minutes. Eventually the device rebooted itself and hung at the boot animation (flashing CM head). I waited for over an hour before deciding I needed to try something else.
So far everything I have done to re-install CM 12.1 results in a very long "Finishing boot" dialog followed by a reboot and then a never ending boot animation.
I'm not sure what changed today to get me into this situation and why a reinstall isn't helping. I've used both TWRP and Cyanogenmod Recover to perform factory resets and have tried several versions of CM 12.1 with no luck:
cm-12.1-20160121-NIGHTLY-d2spr.zip
cm-12.1-20151117-SNAPSHOT-YOG7DAO1K7-d2spr.zip
One other prior to the release that I can't recall now
The device appears to be functional because I can install CM 11 (cm-11-20150831-SNAPSHOT-XNG3CAO3FN-d2lte.zip) without any issues.
Any ideas as to why CM 12.1 no longer works on my Galaxy S3 or what I should try next?
