One day for no apparent reason, boot-loop.
TWRP 2.2.2 installed and that still works.
Wipe cache & dalvik. No help.
Dirty re-flash exact same rom. No help. (Didn't expect that one to help of course but it's about the only thing left to try that doesn't lose data, and it's free and at least harmless.)
Nothing left to try that preserves data.
No recent backup. Oh crap. Months of txt's will be lost.
Make a nandroid backup with TWRP "just because". No idea what I might be able to do with it since the rom boot-loops. Do it anyway. The data I want to save is "in there somewhere some how".
Factory reset in TWRP. (IE: wipe data)
Boots fine. Empty new phone. Internal and external SD cards preserved, so pics/books/music all ok, contacts re-syncing from gmail. txts gone of course as I knew they would be.
Titanium Backup Pro > Menu > Extract from nandroid" > Dialer Storage
HOLY CRAP RESTORED!!!!!
Thank you TWRP!
Thank you TiBU!
Saved and restored my data AFTER rom was already in unusable boot-loop.
That is all.
nice info
so whatever happen just do Nanddroid backup
KEYofR said:
One day for no apparent reason, boot-loop.
TWRP 2.2.2 installed and that still works.
Wipe cache & dalvik. No help.
Dirty re-flash exact same rom. No help. (Didn't expect that one to help of course but it's about the only thing left to try that doesn't lose data, and it's free and at least harmless.)
Nothing left to try that preserves data.
No recent backup. Oh crap. Months of txt's will be lost.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Mine did the same thing while I was travelling - was very annoying. Thankfully I had a very recent backup to work from, as well as a ROM in memory to be able to re-flash. Was weird and out of the blue.
dimqs153 said:
nice info
so whatever happen just do Nanddroid backup
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Nandroid backups require a reboot, which is annoying
Thankfully, when my phone started boot looping yesterday, I thought to make a backup before restoring a (month and a half!) old nandroid image. Had to get it working again, obiously, but so much happens in a month and a half. I was hoping to hack the backup to turn off Wifi, which I assumed was the problem because the last thing I did before the boot loop was enable it*, but fortunately I happened upon this thread. All I had to do is restore my new data+apps from the nandroid image over my old, working backup and I'm set. Fixed forever (hah!).
Let this be a lesson, kids: root your phone (even if you use a stock ROM like me!) and use the amazing community-created backup tools. They'll save your life wallet and data
*Possibly related: http://forums.androidcentral.com/htc-evo-4g-lte/212245-boot-loop-noooo.html - lot of people there basially saying they enabled Wifi just before things hit the fan.
I had the "just enabled wifi" boot loop once too some months ago. That time I had a clue because the home screen would almost come all the way up before the reboot and I could see the wifi icon on the notifications, and of course I had just been trying to connect to an access point when it started.
That time I managed to get in and disable wifi just before it caused a reboot. Took about 3 tries, trying to get into settings as soon as possible during boot up. But it worked and I didn't need a backup that day. I think that was still on the original shipped stock rom.
Sent from my EVO using xda premium
I've recently been getting into more security cautious habits with encryption and what not, due to this whole NSA/Big-brother is watching business... But I have a question (more may pop up as this discussion goes on). Sorry if I seem noob-y, I am still getting a hang of all this encryption business. But here's my first round (regarding just the files being backed up):
If I go ahead and do a full phone encryption with my GN2 where will I stand as far as backups to Dropbox/Copy/Google Drive/etc.?
I currently have photos and such backing up to copy, and I often move backups made through recovery to Dropbox and such. If I were to have photos automatically sync to copy or move system backups to dropbox wouldn't that render them basically useless as I am assuming they move out of the phone encrypted (not being decrypted as they exit).
The photos would be unusable anywhere besides my phone right? So moving them off my phone to share vacation photos for instance would be impossible, and if my phone were to crash they'd be irretrievable? Making the backup process pointless.
Wouldn't the back up be rendered useless as well, exactly when I might need said backup? If my phone were to ever crash or die for some reason, I would lose the encryption key, would even be able to do a full system restore through the recovery? It would seem that the encryption key wouldn't be kept with those back up files, so while it might place everything back in its correct place, it would still be unreadable. Or does it maybe keep the key in system files somewhere so that a full backup would restore the key as well?
And my second round of questions (regarding recoveries and what not):
I am also under the impression that I would not be able to flash through custom recovery either as the internal SD would be inaccessible from the recovery being it doesn't have the encryption key. I am currently running OmniROM and it is in a nightly stage still for my phone. I wouldn't be able to update nightly would I? I am assuming since it basically flashes/overwrites system each time, that I would be losing my encryption key and making everything besides system unusable then right?
And what about downloading ROMs to flash/update directly to my phone? As I download them from in browser or another app and they go to the default /downloads folder they would be encrypted. They wouldn't be accessible from there in recovery, but if I were to try and move them out of internal SD to the external SD they would retain encryption and still be inaccessible? So the only way to download ROMs and updates would be from PC and only move them to the external SD?
Overall, this seems to be crippling a lot of the way I use my phone...
Bump?
Sorry, this is already getting buried and I kinda want to know what's going on before I go ahead and do this...
Zombtastic said:
I've recently been getting into more security cautious habits with encryption and what not, due to this whole NSA/Big-brother is watching business... But I have a question (more may pop up as this discussion goes on). Sorry if I seem noob-y, I am still getting a hang of all this encryption business. But here's my first round (regarding just the files being backed up):
If I go ahead and do a full phone encryption with my GN2 where will I stand as far as backups to Dropbox/Copy/Google Drive/etc.?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm not (yet) an expert on this, but when you've encrypted your device, it encrypts the file system on your internal memory and SD card. You have to enter a PIN/password when you turn on your device (and when it times out) to gain access. When the correct PIN is entered at boot time, the file system is available as normal - the underlying data is still encrypted, but the file system can unencrypt it in "real time" for use by apps and the system.
So that means that Dropbox et al all see your files as normal, and any copying you do from your device to something on the net (Drive, Dropbox, a server, etc.) works as normal - the data appears normal to the apps and is copied as normal. So photos would copy across as photos, music as music, etc.
Think of it like this: You can't speak Urdu, only English. There is a book you own that is written in Urdu that you want to tell someone about. You find a translator to read the book and tell you what it says. He reads the first page in Urdu, translates it in his head to English, and tells you what it says. You then tell your friend what it says (in English, of course). Your friend writes down what you told him, in English, then tells you something in reply. You tell your Urdu translator what your friend said (again, in English). Your Urdu translator then translates (in his head) what you said from English to Urdu, and writes it down in the book in Urdu.
At no time do you understand Urdu, nor does your friend. Your friend doesn't even know the book is written in Urdu and doesn't care. He never sees it or accesses it directly. If anyone ever steals your book, they can't read it unless they can read Urdu. The book is only useful to you and your friends if you have an Urdu translator sitting there in the loop. (the analogy is imperfect and incomplete but you get the idea).
So, getting back to your phone, if you have it encrypted, the underlying file system deals with translating things on the fly if you've given it the correct password at boot and login time. No apps ever know about the encryption - they just see data as normal (unencrypted). So any app that wants to copy a photo to Dropbox just sees a normal photo - it never sees the underlying encrypted data. But if you don't enter the correct password at boot time, the phone can't boot, and anyone trying to access the data on the phone won't be able to read it unless they know the password.
Does that help or confuse?
Zombtastic said:
I currently have photos and such backing up to copy, and I often move backups made through recovery to Dropbox and such. If I were to have photos automatically sync to copy or move system backups to Dropbox wouldn't that render them basically useless as I am assuming they move out of the phone encrypted (not being decrypted as they exit).
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hmm, this does my head in a bit but lets untangle it:
- you boot into Recovery. The Recovery you're using (obviously) understands encrypted file systems (some versions of CWM do, some versions of TWRM don't for instance - see near the end of this post for a bit more on this). So when you boot into Recovery and enter your PIN/password, it can then read your file system. You can then do a Recovery-based backup of your file system (or individual files, though I'm not aware that you can do this). The backup it creates is written to the encrypted file system and thus encrypted with the same encryption keys used for everything else.
- You boot the phone back up as normal and enter your PIN/password, and start up Android. You then use Dropbox to copy the Recovery backup files to the cloud. So the question is, "Are these files encrypted?" and I think the answer is, "No". Why? Read the rest of this post and hopefully you'll work out the same conclusion. But I'm pretty sure that the data that ends up on the Cloud is not encrypted.
One general comment worth pointing out as an aside (sorry, this paragraph isn't really related to the above but I wanted to point this out somewhere and its still useful) is that each time you encrypt your phone, it creates a unique encryption key - even if you give it the same PIN/password to use. So if you're forced to rebuild/reflash/wipe your phone in the future, it won't be able to access any data that is still on there (in internal or SD memory) since it won't know the previous encryption key. So you'll have to wipe all data and start again. And at that point, if you choose to encrypt your fresh, newly initialized phone, it will have a new, unique encryption key that won't work on any encrypted data from previous. So if for instance, you plug in an SD card that was encrypted on your phone in an earlier ROM, it won't be readable even if you know the correct PIN/password, since your phone will be using a different underlying unique key.
Zombtastic said:
The photos would be unusable anywhere besides my phone right? So moving them off my phone to share vacation photos for instance would be impossible, and if my phone were to crash they'd be irretrievable? Making the backup process pointless.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
So, if you're following this, you'll now understand that moving your photos off your phone could be done two ways:
- while you're using the phone as normal (ie. you've booted it, entered your PIN/password, and copying your photos to Dropbox via an app while you're logged on. If you do it this way, you're simply copying photos as normal that can be viewed as normal in Dropbox.
- by copying backups generated while in Recovery. But Recovery will be firstly mounting the encrypted file system successfully (if you gave it the right PIN/password and your version of Recovery supports encryption), which means it can read your photos as normal files, then backs them up into its own normal Recovery file/folder structure and writes them to your encrypted file system, so the underlying data is encrypted unbeknownst to Recovery. Then when you boot up your phone and log in successfully to Android, you can access that data as normal (and unencrypted). So when you then copy it to Dropbox, all you're copying is normal Recovery-created backup files. The copied data won't be encrypted (unless Recovery encrypts them itself, independently, which I don't think it does). So you could copy this data to anybody's phone, so long as they were using a compatible Recovery version and probably compatible ROM.
Zombtastic said:
Wouldn't the back up be rendered useless as well, exactly when I might need said backup? If my phone were to ever crash or die for some reason, I would lose the encryption key, would even be able to do a full system restore through the recovery? It would seem that the encryption key wouldn't be kept with those back up files, so while it might place everything back in its correct place, it would still be unreadable. Or does it maybe keep the key in system files somewhere so that a full backup would restore the key as well?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm not 100% sure on this, but I think your logic is correct. The backup would be useless if the phone loses the encryption key, which it would do if you re-initialized your phone and/or did a new encryption. So you can only recover your backed up data if you haven't done either of those things. A solution to this is to use backup software that runs on your phone (Titanium Backup) that gives you the option to encrypt your data. Some caveats to this approach should be obvious:
- you firstly need to decide if you trust your backup software's encryption
- you need to use a strong password and be able to recall it months/years from now when you go to restore your data
- you need to copy your backups off your phone (such as onto your SD card, cloud, dropbox, etc.) in case you lose your phone.
Zombtastic said:
And my second round of questions (regarding recoveries and what not):
I am also under the impression that I would not be able to flash through custom recovery either as the internal SD would be inaccessible from the recovery being it doesn't have the encryption key. I am currently running OmniROM and it is in a nightly stage still for my phone. I wouldn't be able to update nightly would I? I am assuming since it basically flashes/overwrites system each time, that I would be losing my encryption key and making everything besides system unusable then right?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Tricky - if you flash/update your phone with a new ROM, you will probably be OK so long as you haven't wiped the part of your phone's storage that holds the encryption information. I don't know where this is. But the nightly updates I do to my phone don't normally touch my data - all my apps are still there and it boots identically to the way it did before I updated it. HOWEVER, its possible that an update may force me to wipe my phone for some reason - the update may fail, it may contain significant changes, or I might screw something up. I probably end up completely wiping my phone at least once every 2 months just because I like to play with the latest and greatest ROMs, or I screw something up. So if that happens, I'm going to lose the encryption information and thus would lose everything on the phone.
Of course, I can always restore my apps and data via Titanium Backup, since I back up my stuff quite often and then copy it to Dropbox.
Zombtastic said:
And what about downloading ROMs to flash/update directly to my phone? As I download them from in browser or another app and they go to the default /downloads folder they would be encrypted. They wouldn't be accessible from there in recovery, but if I were to try and move them out of internal SD to the external SD they would retain encryption and still be inaccessible? So the only way to download ROMs and updates would be from PC and only move them to the external SD?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hmmm - good question. A simpler question is, "Is my encrypted file system accessible while in Recovery?" I believe the answer is, "Yes, if you use CWM, No if you use TWRM". But I say that because from what I've been reading, some versions of CWM/TWRM can/can't handle encrypted devices. But you'll already have sorted this out at the time you're trying to encrypt your device anyway since the encryption process involves rebooting your phone into recovery I believe - and if you're not using the correct supported Recovery, this step will fail. But if you are using a supported recovery, this step will work, and therefore logically I'd assume that you can access your encrypted file system while in Recovery in the future. I'd imagine Recovery would prompt you for your PIN/password in order to mount the encrypted file system.
So assuming the above is correct, you would be able to access the newly-downloaded ROMs while in Recovery and thus can flash them. But of course, Caveat Emptor with flashing the new ROM - if it forces you to wipe anything, you may end up unable to access any of the data.
Zombtastic said:
Overall, this seems to be crippling a lot of the way I use my phone...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
From what I've been researching, you won't have a problem anyway, because I haven't come across anyone that has successfully encrypted their phone using a custom ROM. Strangely, this ability seems to be unwanted by XDA people. My tinfoil hat tells me that there are people ensuring that this ability continues to not work on custom ROMs until/unless a backdoor capability is found. Hopefully I'm wrong on many counts.
douginoz said:
From what I've been researching, you won't have a problem anyway, because I haven't come across anyone that has successfully encrypted their phone using a custom ROM. Strangely, this ability seems to be unwanted by XDA people. My tinfoil hat tells me that there are people ensuring that this ability continues to not work on custom ROMs until/unless a backdoor capability is found. Hopefully I'm wrong on many counts.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Amazing post by the way! It does seem very helpful.
BUT it's very funny you mention it not working. Because that's exactly what happened. After not getting a response here or in the ROM's forum for a few days, I decided to just take the plunge and do it. I was just planning on testing everything out my self and figuring it out as I went. The first time it seemed fine, the encryption went through it seemed.
Being as I didn't know any of the info you just enlightened me with, I did fear that nothing was truly encrypted though. Everything was transferring to my computer with a drag and drop and working fine, so I was afraid (without evidence) that nothing was truly encrypted. I asked on the ROM's forum again (still waiting for an answer).
That night, my phone was left plugged in charging, yet some how had turned off in the night. I awake to my phone asking for an encryption key. I enter my key in to no avail. Nothing works and my phone is left unable to boot. It was utterly denying my password. I had to reflash. I asked about that in the forums as well, whether that was normal or if encryption was maybe not implemented yet, etc. The dev running the nightlies for my device has responded to the forum multiple times but not to me. Another user mentioned it might be that it is now merged together as a Galaxy Note 2 ROM and not specifically a T-mobile Galaxy Note 2 ROM (might be possible. Idk.).
Now, I have tried to re-encrypt. Multiple times. But I cannot for the life of me get it to even start now. Every time I go to start the encryption process it shows me the fullscreen image of the android unzipped horizontally (at which point it is supposed to reboot and start encrypting) and it hangs/sits there forever. Not rebooting, not anything. If I hit the back button, the image disappears and it goes back to my phone. Working perfectly fine, like it never even started doing anything. I am not doing anything differently. I don't know what could be happening to stop it from even getting as far as it did last time. Unless the devs maybe started working on it and have disabled it for the time being/screwed it up worse, I dunno.
Not you got me crafting a tin-foil hat...
Long story short, my wife upgraded from her old android phone (HTC Sensation XL – Android 4.0.3) to a new iPhone a few weeks ago. I thought everything had been moved off it so I did a factory reset (including the checkbox to clear all data) as it was to be handed down to another family member. I then set up the phone with the new account, installed all the apps, etc.
The next day I found out there was a very important voice recording from the stock android program (.AMR format) of a work meeting she has to transcribe minutes for....
I then proceeded to try the following PC programs -
- Recuva
- EaseUS MobiSave
After more googling I decided to root the phone as some data recovery programs require that. After rooting I tried –
- Wondershare Dr Fone
- Diskdigger Pro (on phone)
- Undeleter (on phone)
- Zero assumption recovery
Some of these programs found deleted files but nothing I could see was from the original content, not even a single picture.
My last resort is trying to dump the contents of the phone to a RAW format then converting it to a VHD mountable file, as per the following guides. However this seems to be only if the data is corrupted or file deleted (not factory reset?)
http://forum.xda-developers.com/gal...de-internal-memory-data-recovery-yes-t1994705
http://blog.avast.com/2014/07/09/android-foreniscs-pt-2-how-we-recovered-erased-data/
I think it is possible to find a picture or two, or maybe some text messages. But the chances of a 30min audio recording being intact are basically 0% right? I am reasonably technically skilled and said I would try all options, but it seems I am fighting a losing battle...
Any comments or suggestions must appreciated!
Doh!
I started a factory reset on my phone, then realised I still had unsaved precious holiday photos on the device.
I removed the battery almost instantly after pressing the reset button, thus stopping the process. The mobile is connected to a PC by USB, but of course without the battery in place there is no way of viewing and transferring files on the phone. When the battery is replaced, the factory reset process continues where it left off - on the "deleting files" screen.
So-
1. Is there any way to stop or interrupt the factory reset process?
2. Is there any way to retrieve the photos/files whilst the reset is frozen with the battery removed?
3. If the files cannot be recovered by normal operation of the phone, can they be recovered by a specialist company from the deactivated phone?
Phone is a Samsung Galaxy S3 Duos (dual-SIM) GT-i9300i
Android will be stock current version.
Thanks for any help!
Bump.
Additional question:
Whats a recommended recovery utility to try and recover files after a factory reset?
Thx
Hello buddy, so when do a factory reset in any device is impossible to stop it. You 'll lose all your files. Is very important to do back ups in many memories card or in an app (Google drive).
I auto-back up all files except photos (to stop very large files being auto-copied to other devices by Google/Dropbox, etc) and normally just transfer each batch of photos to a server archive.
On this occasion I was just looking at the factory reset options, and off it went (screen is somewhat over-sensitive on this phone) - not even a warning dialogue, as on other devices and versions.
If it can't be stopped, then my only hope is to run a retrieval programme as soon as the phone has finished rebooting. Hence my question about what is the best/most successful data retrieval application that people recommend?
Thunderbox said:
I auto-back up all files except photos (to stop very large files being auto-copied to other devices by Google/Dropbox, etc) and normally just transfer each batch of photos to a server archive.
On this occasion I was just looking at the factory reset options, and off it went (screen is somewhat over-sensitive on this phone) - not even a warning dialogue, as on other devices and versions.
If it can't be stopped, then my only hope is to run a retrieval programme as soon as the phone has finished rebooting. Hence my question about what is the best/most successful data retrieval application that people recommend?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I am afraid that data retrieval is impossible since you haven't made some sort of backup and have deleted everything by factory resetting. Sorry buddy.
Thunderbox said:
Doh!
I started a factory reset on my phone, then realised I still had unsaved precious holiday photos on the device.
I removed the battery almost instantly after pressing the reset button, thus stopping the process. The mobile is connected to a PC by USB, but of course without the battery in place there is no way of viewing and transferring files on the phone. When the battery is replaced, the factory reset process continues where it left off - on the "deleting files" screen.
So-
1. Is there any way to stop or interrupt the factory reset process?
2. Is there any way to retrieve the photos/files whilst the reset is frozen with the battery removed?
3. If the files cannot be recovered by normal operation of the phone, can they be recovered by a specialist company from the deactivated phone?
Phone is a Samsung Galaxy S3 Duos (dual-SIM) GT-i9300i
Android will be stock current version.
Thanks for any help!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Dont get so worried. Wiping data partition doesnt delete /data/media. Which means your photos , videos , downloads is still there. Which recovery do you use ?
Today I learned that hotplugging SIM cards is not a good idea.
"It's just a SIM card, what could possibly go wrong?"
I did this today and after about one minute my h850 rebooted (soft reboot). Since then it continues to freeze for a moment after boot and then reboots. It doesn't matter if the SIM-card is inserted or not. This phone is running the official LOS 20170704 weekly and TWRP (fortunately).
I could reproduce this on a falcon also running LOS from June or July. Restoring the data partition from a backup resolved the bootloop on this phone and it is running fine with the SIM for several hours now.
This means that inserting the SIM while booted must have messed with something on the data partition.
Unfortunately the backup on my h850 is quite a few days old, and more importantly I got a few SMS (from the last few days) right before the bootloop started. Because of this, restoring from the backup is not very inviting and I decided to try to find the source of the bootloop and fix it.
At first I will try to grab some logfiles (logcat & kmesg) - however this is only possible on the falcon for now, because the h850 is not authenticated. I thought about other ways to solve this riddle in case this doesn't show where I have to look.
Since I can reproduce the issue on a second phone I thought about doing a backup right before and another one afterwards. Since the bootloop occurs due to a change on the data partition it must be visible if I compare both backups. I have a simple problem with this though: I don't know how to compare them. Thus, my first question: Which tool can I use to do this?
If this is not feasible for some reason I would like to rescue some of the data a least. Since I can boot into TWRP I can access the internal storage from my computer. I would also like to save SMS (at the very least) and application data (nice to have). What's the best way to do this? Where are the SMS located? Copying everything to the internal storage and then to the computer would certainly be possible, but also mess up permissions big time.
Thanks for taking your time to read this and help me. I hope I really learned my lesson about impatience, regular backups and taking extra precautions and this will not happen again.
Update: For whatever reason I can't get my falcon to bootloop anymore.