samsung - How to get data off a completely dead Android phone?

Phone worked perfectly. Then one day completely dead, nothing at all. It may have been that "one day" was after some time of laying around, cannot recall.

Model: Android AT&T Samsung Galaxy S3 (SGH-i747 SKU S9255)

Already tried;

• Charging phone: no visual output at all, no leds


• Removing battery while charging: no visual output at all, no leds


• Removing SIM and SD card: no visual output at all, no leds


• Attempt to turn on: no visual output at all, no leds

I need to get our family photo's off this phone (stored on internal memory). I care less about the hardware/phone itself.

Thank you for any help you can offer!

Answer

It seems like a hardware issue (not directly related to storage), better try to get fixed. Unless the device boots at least to some bootloader stage (like fastboot or odin or edl) you can't access its memory. Or if the data is extremely important, contact some professional data recovery service which usually do one of the two:

• Access eMMC directly using some low level protocol like JTAG. Special equipment - usually called some kind of box e.g EasyJtag - is used to make communication with eMMC.


• 
  

  Or using a chip-off method i.e. by removing eMMC chip from board.

  
  

  Most devices built in the last few years use eMMC flash devices as their persistent storage. Usually eMMC and RAM are bundled in a single package; eMCP. So a compatible eMMC/eMCP reader can be used to recover data by connecting it to PC. A range of such readers/sockets is available on online stores from a number of chinese manufacturers - e.g. Allsocket and KZT - to match with different sizes and shapes of BGA packages.

  
  

Please note that there are other factors as well which may define the destiny of data recovery through JTAG or a chip-off method. Data recovery is very less probable or impossible if:

• eMMC is dead i.e. it has reached the limit of E/P cycles it was designed for.


• You were using encryption (FDE/FBE) on your device. Starting with Android 5.0 encryption is hardware-backed. Quoted from here:
  

  
  

  By default, the decryption key is stored in the hardware-backed storage
  ...
  bear in mind that extracting the decryption key via chip-off or any other low-level method is not possible, so if you do a chip-off you won’t get the decryption key and won’t be able to decrypt the data.

  
  

  
  

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