Reset "erase everything" doesn't erase everything? - Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting

Hello,
I usually sell my old phone when I get a new one and now one person who bought my phone told me something that made me feel very uncomfortable.
It seems that the phone I gave him still had my downloaded .pdf files on it.
When I sell a phone I always do a hard reset and I always checked for leftover photos (as I noticed that some photos are left behind), but I didn't realise downloaded documents would also be left on the phone.
When you reset your phone, it clearly says all your data will be erased (as you can see in this capture from my Z3)... And then it leaves private information on it such as photos and PDFs?!
I want to know if this is the general case -as in hard reset not deleting downloaded pdfs etc- for any android device or is it just the case for Oppo (the one I found it on)?
LE: I performed a hard reset on the Z3 -which has the disclaimer you see in the photo- and all the PDF files from downloads are still there. Unbelievable!
Thank you.

Related

Password Reset in WM6

Is there a way to reset the startu-up (boot) password in WM6? Please avice.
hmmmm...... maybe the other guys have some better idea
but from my point of view, only a hard reset can get you out of that one
AllGamer said:
hmmmm...... maybe the other guys have some better idea
but from my point of view, only a hard reset can get you out of that one
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
you got that right.....happened to me before, forgot my password and had to do a hard reset.
if its your phone then hard reset, if its not yours give it back to the owner.
lennie said:
you got that right.....happened to me before, forgot my password and had to do a hard reset.
if its your phone then hard reset, if its not yours give it back to the owner.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
________________________
It is mine. The password got changed by itself. I know the password very well. This is the second time happpend with me with this HTC WM6 Rom.
windows mobile protection system is a ****.
It's true, the password change it self.
Just use a 3dparty program for password protection...
I have performed the hard reset and then full system restore thru SPB Backups 2. Thank you all for your great support and help.
It happened to my once, I contacted HTC and they told my only way it was a hard reset, hence I do not use windows password protection anymore
No surprise here,as always Microsoft security features=piece of crap, really....
really, that has never happened to me before
At the time I had a Hermes, no matter how many times tried the password no joy (and it was a simple numerical one)
I've just been caught as well on WM6.5 Its still no better!
6.1 Hosed up Too
I just got back from vacation yesterday. The phone worked fine until this morning. Somehow the password changed and I cannot get in. This sucks! I will lose all of my vacation photos (on internal memory) if I do a hard reset. The good news: I did a back up prior to going on vacation, so I won't lose everything. I, however, really hate to lose two weeks of photos. Any suggestions on how to retrieve my data?
Thanks for your um, silence. I did a hard reset, but skipped the flash drive reformat. This reset the main memory to factory settings, but did not delete any of the files on the flash disk. I saved all of my photos, spreadsheets, and other data from the vacation. I restored the August 13th backup, but only the main memory files and lost very little.
This was a scary experience for two reasons: 1) I almost lost a ton of data, 2) I got it all back without needing a password. I thought that data on the flash disk was secure, but I was soooo wrong. All 16Gb are as secure as what is on the MicroSD card. If someone stole my device and performed the same operation they would have had lots of embarrassing photos of me at a bacchelor party and wearing a Spedo (or less) on the beach. I guess this is something I need to keep in mind in the future. I don't need these photos popping up when I run for president.
That is why you should never wear speedo's and make pictures when you wear even less...

Touch Pro from Sprint is bricked by HTC hotfix

Hi,
this seems to be the right place for the question, but I'm sure the answer will be applicable to other phone. Assuming there is going to be an answer
Stupidly, yours truly downloaded and installed hotfix from here http://www.htc.com/www/supportdownloadlist.aspx?p_id=140&act=sd&cat=all in the hopes of improving audio quality. Well, this apparently was not meant for CDMA (or US phones). After installing the phone rebooted and got stuck at the Touch Pro screen where it lists FW/SW versions in red towards the bottom. The phone can not get past that point no matter what I do (reset, battery remove/replace) or how long I wait (overnight). Sprint 'suggested' hard reset (thank you very much) and HTC said they have no fix for that either. Well, if you have not guessed it already, I have not backed up the data on that phone. Ever.
Not smart
The phone was running stock SF/FW before. I have not had time to mess with it.
US$64K question is: Could I retrieve the phone book? Any other data that was not on SD card (that one is safe)? Is there a chance to recover data AFTER hard reset? Anything else the smart folk out there can recommend?
Thanks a lot in advance.
try flashing via SD card
If its stuck at the bootloader mode (the tri color screen) i thing its possible to flash it via SD card.
there is plenty of info around or check out the Raphael wiki.
There is a chance it is not bricked.
(i seriouslly doubt is it because the HTC hotfix cannot do that)
Let me know if you need any more help my email me at hotmail
best regards.... Erik
The screen looks like this: http://i60.photobucket.com/albums/h15/cadillacjew/TP-1.jpg
with some test indicating SW/ROM etc versions in RED at the bottom. If it is important I can upload the picture of it.
Also may take you up on your offer. Need those contacts, otherwise I'm so screwed
I dunno, it sounds like you're going to need a hard reset. That will fix the problem, I'm sure. Have you tried connecting by active sync? I'm 99.999% positive it won't work, but it wouldn't hurt to at least try and see if you can pull pim.vol off of it. Also, you might download ceregeditor (just google it) and install it on your pc, and see if you can dump the registry from the phone. But I have a bad feeling you're screwed.
Is this really the end of the road?
Yes, I (and Sprint store that I went to) tried connecting the phone via usb and it was not even recognized as a device. Hard reset sounds goo, but it will erase the data. Before I take that drastic measure I'd like to make sure there is nothing else I could do.
I'm willing to pay some money to a forensics company to extract the data, but can not find one that looks trustworthy and experienced when it comes to Win mobile phones. Any recommendations, btw?
I have no clue; you might try one of the rom dumping procedures. I think that some may dump the rom and all the info on the phone; I've never done it myself (well, I've played with grab_it on another device, with little success). I believe that some will dump all the info on the phone (rom + stuff in main memory). But I can't tell you how to do it, I'm afraid, and I have no clue if it will work on your phone.
You can check these tools-maybe there's something there.
Most likely everything is gone.
I have to sadly agree. This sounds like something only a hard reset would fix.
Any possibility of data recovery after hard reset? Anybody knows of a way to that? Of course this is wishful thinking on my part, but I'm pretty desperate now.
fatherof2 said:
Any possibility of data recovery after hard reset? Anybody knows of a way to that? Of course this is wishful thinking on my part, but I'm pretty desperate now.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Unfortunately, it seems that you are stuck. I do not know of any way to recover your data if the device is stuck on bootloader since, as you pointed out, the device does not get recognized by the computer.
Anything that you do at this point might end up making things worse if you are not careful. Just cut your losses and hard reset the device.
its not in booloader mode, dumping the ROM sounds like a good and only way to go, try it, it wont hurt you, if that dont work i'd say its pretty much dead with no way to recover it, unless the info is unrecoverable (spell?) hard reset it.....
best regards. Erik
The only issue with your suggestion is that I'm no longer in possession of the phone. I had to leave it in the Sprint store in order to walk out with working phone. I can go back to the store and try to get the data off of my old phone. They are holding it for me.
However, I need to know what to do exactly and be able to do it quickly. So if there are easy to follow instructions that you can point me to, please do so.
Also after dumping ROM what data will I have?
TIA for all your help.
your data will be gone but try putting a raphimg.nbh file on the memory card then holding power and volume down while hitting the reset button, that will flash you off the mem card. good luck. Ive had to do this several times due to bad flashes and vista issues. Oh and as an added thought start using microsoft myphone to back up your data in the future.
Thanks for your suggestion. I will try this in a week or so when I'm back in town.
Also myphone is something that should work. I actually did not know about it until this past Monday. I have not looked at any MS-based backup solutions because I'm not using their software, if I can avoid it. So while I have a Windows PC I do not have Outlook installed and thus have never given my phone a chance to sync up. Kind of silly, I know.
I had bitpm installed on another system that went bad. I've replaced it with a new one, retrieved other files and data, but forgot about Bitpm folder
So few lessons learned ...
Thanks again to all who provided feedback.
It sucks if you lost everything, but you should be able to put your phone in bootloader and connect it to your pc through usb. The only question is if you can dump the rom that way and if you can dump all the files on it with the rom. The only problem is that some of the rom dumping methods (like with pdocread, I think) require you to transfer a file to your \windows directory, which you're not going to be able to do. It's a long shot at best.
I back up my pim stuff 3 different ways-I think you want to do it in multiple ways just to be safe. My main method is using sk tools and its backup tool. You can separately back up the pim database and the messaging databases (not as important to me). You can also back up email accounts with sk tools (using the pim information tool). These are my main backups, and I keep them on my sd card, and occasionally transfer them to a hard drive (it's not that big of a deal if the hard drive backup is a month out of date to me). I also use Pimbackup 2.8, and store that on my sd card (and hard drive). I don't use it for restoring anymore, because it's pretty slow with 6.5 roms in my experience. Finally, I have a file backup mortscript that I use that backs up user data for various apps; I use it to restore the data after flashes. Anyway, included in the script is a command to copy pim.vol to my sd card. I never restore my pim files by copying pim.vol back to main memory, but I like having it saved just in case, and it doesn't take any time to run the script (FYI-all your contacts, tasks and calendar stuff is stored in pim.vol, which is on the root of your device). Anyway, I feel like my pim databases are pretty safe-it would take an awful lot of bad things to happen for them to be lost, and I'd probably be dead in half of those scenarios, lol.
You're going to lose everything. The phone will not boot and as a result, all your data is unrecoverable. Next time, use a back up solution like Google Sync.
Do a hard-reset on it and you should be good to go. Turn the phone off, hold the volume down key, the center dpad key, and then hold the power button. It'll come up to a screen with hard reset instructions. Push the volume up key here. It'll be ready to go like it's brand new out of the box.
Lost everything, but .... happy
Hi,
thanks to everyone who replied. Just wanted to post and update so we can close this thread.
As I indicated before, Sprint has replaced my phone with Touch Pro 2 when I came to them with this problem. They did it beacuse they no longer have loaner phones and because I was about to go on 10 day business trip.
After using the new phone for 2 weeks, I got to tell you that this one is a leap forward compare to the the old. So I'm happy with new device, installing software and trying to recreate my Address Book by dumping my friends and family's data via Bluetooth. Backing up using MyPhone and about to install Outlook (not going to use it for anything else but the backup)
Also, I finally went to Sprint store and asked them one more time if they can think of any other way to recover the data. I even mentioned bootloader. They did not know/could not do it. I asked them to hard reset and after few tries the phone was restored to it's original state. Not a trace of my data .
Would be nice if in the future I could save contacts (and other data) directly to SD card. IMO it will give better chance of recovery, but I'm not sure it is possible.
Again thanks to all who tried to help. Much appreciated.
Same problem sort of
I tried to load Energy Rom 28005 and now can't get pro to do any thing but restart every 15 seconds or so. any ideas on what can be done? tia.

Help with retriving photos off of broken phone

So my wife broke her phone. (A car ran over it) .
As you can imagine the phone is pretty messed up. Originaly the phone still worked(for a few weeks) and then she bought a new phone and left that one.
Now a few weeks later i try to turn it on to take the pictures off and it boots into the bootloader and thats where i am in need of your help. If there a way for me to get the pictures off of this phone?
Photos shows you have an M7, and this forum section is specific to the M8. While the devices have some similarities, its always best to get help in your specific device forum, in case of any M7 specific naunces, pitfalls, etc.
What I can say, in general:
1) Try booting into recovery, and see if it will mount the internal storage if you connect to a computer. I know custom recovery (TWRP) will let you do this, but I don't know if stock recovery (since it looks like the phone is stock and never modded) has this ability or not (I'm thinking probably not, but hey its worth a try). It might be a long shot, but if you can mount memory, you should be able to simply browse to the folder where the pics are saved, and just copy and paste them to your computer.
2) These devices have a good amount of cloud backup apps built-in (Google Photos, Dropbox, HTC Backup). Depending on whether your wife opened any of them, and agreed to backup the pics, they may already be on the cloud, and can be easily accessed by logging into the specific service's website on a computer. Again, might be a longshot, but one can always hope; and it doesn't hurt to check.
3) Short of the above, if the phone won't boot into OS, you may be somewhat stuck. If the phone can't bootup into OS, and won't mount recovery otherwise, the only options I can think of to get OS or custom recovery on the phone, involves unlocking the bootloader; which will wipe the storage and defeat the whole purpose.
I know hindsight is always 20/20. But I've lost count how many times I've told folks on here and other smartphone forums: If the data is important to you, than back it up. With so many options to do so (backup to computer, cloud, removable SD) there is really no good reason not to. As already mentioned, in particular the cloud backup solutions take very little interaction, and fully automated once you've accepted the option to use them to backup the pics.
I know you've mentioned its your wife's phone. But regardless of whether its her device or yours or whatever; the previous paragraph applies to everyone with a smartphone. At least moving forward, you and your wife should start backing up your personal data (if you haven't already). Waiting for a disaster is not really the best time to started considering backup methods; but late is better than never.
Rant over. Good luck recovering the pics, in any case!

Factory Reset Protection did nothing when my phone was stolen by a little kid

Phone is: Motorola G4 Play, Android v7.1.1
I had it attached to a Google account as well as PIN-locked. Google shows it last being synced on 8/5/19 (day it was stolen). I was able to recover the phone within a day after realizing it was stolen and figuring out who the thief was. Though I never tested it myself, I had seen this --so-called-- protection in the past and assumed it would be active on my phone; however, it clearly wasn't.
When I located it, the kid was playing on the internet with it, using my sim card. He had made it his own at that point. My data was no longer on the phone. According to some folks, I must've had a bad PIN, but it was random digits not associated with any personally identifiable information and the kid himself claims all he did was perform a factory reset.
Even worse, I was under the false impression that Google's Find My Device would help me locate the phone. But apparently it doesn't when the Google account gets wiped during a reset.
So my question is, is there any way to actually secure this phone to make it not so easy for anyone to simply factory reset it and use it as their own?

Factory reset - data recovery

Hey there everyone,
Well, my daughter had factory reseted(is that how it spells or just reset?) my wives phone. She propably held the buttons for too long and then panicked when the screen with the options showed. Anyway....as it happens my wife did decide not to backup her photos. I am a a software developer, but of webapps. I have basic understanding of these things, but I wanted to checkin in with you guys about the best approach.
I know the photos are still in there, just flagged as to be overwritten and are (propably? correct me) recoverable. I found some tool Wondershare dr.fone, that apparentlz should be able to recover the lost data, but requires root acces. I did some digging and I came across the way here, how to root her phone. Full understanding of its ups n downs. I wanted to check, if there is actually some other way to recover data without permantly mangling the phone? Do i have to follow the instructions mentioned above? Any tips and helpful advice is appreciated.
Thanks
U.
I contact/hire a data recovery expert if they're that important.
They may already have been over written.
Even if recovered the metadata for each image will be juxtaposed in a hopeless mess; only the image will be recovered.
The odds are pretty grim... personally I'd write them off.
Next time get a phone with an SD card slot and use an SD card as the data drive. Remember to always back that data up to at least two electronically isolated* hdds periodically... if you value your data.
*preferably in seperate locations in earth grounded metal boxes or safe. One near lightning strike can wipe any hdd not in a Faraday cage.

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