Thursday, July 9, 2015

samsung galaxy s 2 - Recovering internal memory on SGS2 (CWM, not root, boot to recovery only)


I have a Samsung Galaxy S2 (i9100), which stopped booting into the normal OS. I have no idea why - one morning it turned itself off, and when I started it, it went as far as the "Samsung" screen, and just hangs.


I have pictures on the "internal" SD card (flash memory), which I would like to recover.


I can boot into recovery, and have installed the latest version of CWM touch, which allows me to mount both the internal and external sdcard. I can do a "browse for update" on both internal and external sdcard, and all the files I want are there. However, even when internal sdcard is mounted, I cannot access it with adb, presumably because I don't have root.



Just to see what I can do without root, I used CWM allowed me to backup the system, but because the backup is written to the internal card, I cannot check whether it's worked. However, it is taking about 1.5GB of space on the internal card, so I assume it must have backed up something.


Any ideas? Could I write a script that would copy the contents of the internal sd card to the external sd card, without root?


If I rooted the phone, would I loose the content on the internal sd card? (I have looked into rooting, but only with heimdall so far, and I could not get it to recognise the phone on linux or OS X.)


Any thoughts and suggestions will be much appreciated! Thanks!



Answer



I initially installed CWM v5 (as zip from CWM site), but that appears mount the internal sd card memory with root permissions only. I finally tried CWM 6.0.4.5 (again as zip, not from cwm site). The zip failed verification, so I couldn't install it. However, in v5, there's an option to ignore that, so I was able to run v6. It seems to run fine so far, and the storage is mounted correctly, and I can now pull with adb!


So - solution: - Boot into stock recovery - Install CWM v5 (from cwm site) from sd card (as zip) - Use that to install CWM v6 from sd card (as zip) - Then use adb to pull /storage/sdcard0. (adb will not preserve time stamps, but you can do a "ls -laRe" if you want particular file stamps


So in this way I was able to retrieve the contents of the internal sd card. Full details http://www.sciencemedianetwork.org/Blog/20140304_Samsung_Galaxy_S2_data_recovery


However, after factory reset, the phone still doesn't boot. Follow up question here: Complete reset of SGS2 (factory reset not sufficient)


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