Help Recovering pictures from unrooted Nexus 5 in boot loop

[Ozgur Sahin]

[I already spent several days on this with no results so I am about to give up. Maybe some experts here can provide some suggestions.]

I dropped my Nexus 5 into water 5 days ago (into a lake, fresh water). I dried it with towels, some blowdrying and letting it sit on the table for couple days. Right now, when I turn on my phone it shows 'google' text (and vibrates), stays there for while (5 to 25 seconds), then reboots; and just keeps doing the same cycle all over.
I can get to fastboot menu by holding down volume and power buttons, but then when I choose an option from the menu ('Start' or 'Recovery Mode'), it reboots and goes back to the same loop again.

I am trying to recover the pictures from the phone. Getting the pictures is more important getting the phone running so anything that would wipe my data is not an option.

The phone doesn't go past the google logo screen so there is no 'adb' (Nothing happens when I connect the phone to my laptop through usb). I cannot do anything with fastboot because the phone is not rooted and and fastboot commands require rooting, which would wipe my pictures ('fastboot devices' on my laptop lists the phone). I cannot do a factory reset because 1) selecting 'recovery' goes back to reboot loop, and 2) that would wipe out my data. So, is there any hope for me to get the pictures??

At this point, as a last try, I am planning to open up the phone, clean the components with isopropyl alcohol (91% available at drug store), let it dry for couple days, and hope that helps. Otherwise, admit defeat...

 

[Hadron]

The proper drying procedure would be to turn it off (since you can't remove the battery) and keep it in a jar of dessicant (uncooked rice works if you don't have anything more serious like silica gel) for a couple of days. But yeah, right now the isopropyl wash may be the best bet.

If you have a custom recovery and could get into that then you could retrieve them using ADB, but with a stock recovery I can't think of any way unless you can get it to boot (and you can't get into recovery anyway). Frankly I doubt that a factory reset would help with this one anyway, even if it weren't self-defeating. So I don't think there is any real alternative to trying to get it booting.

 

[GuitarG20]

OP, do you by any chance have photo auto-backup enabled? If you're not sure, you can check photos.google.com to see if it might have been enabled.

 

[Ozgur Sahin]

Amazingly this story has a happy ending.
I opened up the phone and the motherboard was mostly clean, with some white residue mostly along the edges. I used 2 cotton swabs to clean them with the 99% alcohol I got from Safeway, and quickly dried it with a blowdryer. I put the board back in without even screwing and turned on the phone (since i was pretty sure it wasn't going to work and I was going to submerge the whole board in alcohol as the absolute last try), and it actually started!! The screen looks like the sky on a gloomy day with big watermarks with all tones of gray, but otherwise everything works, including touch events. I quickly copied 5gb of pictures to my laptop, turned on auto backup and left the phone on overnight (with unscrewed motherboard and no back cover since i wasn't sure if it would still work after a restart) to backup everything to cloud. Restarted it next day and it still worked. I have been using it for a few days now.
I called Google Play support to see if they would replace it but they said no. Still, I got my pictures, and phone is usable and will be good enough until I get my next Android.