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Help Gutted! Lost wedding/honeymoon photos. Galaxy S3 hooked up at login. Please help.

joeninho

Lurker
Aug 2, 2012
6
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Dear All,

I hope I have posted this in the correct place. We are desperate for some help. I have a galaxy S3. We were married two weeks ago in Spain and we have over 2000 pictures stored on the phone from the wedding/honeymoon. The day before we returned, disaster struck...

When I turn the phone on it will not go past the boot screen - 'Samsung Galaxy S3 GT I9300'. The phone will automatically come on and hook up at this screen. If I plug the charger in, a grey bttery picture appears, but nothing to say the phone is charging. Soft reset does nothing. Kies does not recognise the phone.

We are devastated at the thought of losing all of our photographs from the wedding/honeymoon.

Can anyone help? Is there any way to retrieve our pictures? We would be eternally grateful for any help!

Many thanks.

Kind Regards,

Joe.
 
Internal SD should be intact. I think the problem is at operating system not at hardware. I am not expert at this subject but MAYBE, authorized service may boot your phone in debugging mode and you may access everything in Internal SD card.

And I will suggest you to use Dropbox, a cloud storage app that automatically backs up your pictures.
 
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I can't imagine how cutting that must be to lose these photos, but the images should still be intact on the internal storage but I don't see how you can access them now.

A factory reset might reboot your phone but you would lose all the data on the internal storage.

Hopefully somebody knows a way around this, there must be a way to recover the images. :(
 
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I can tell you from experience that the photos most likely (99%) are not lost. I am sure you are using the phone the way it was designed and you are using an SD card. Even if the card became corrupted there is software that can recover the photos. If you are not using a good quality SD card (why?), then the pictures still can be recovered by almost anyone with forensic capabilities. Samsung may even be able to help.
 
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Can't you put the sdcard into your PC (if you have an sdcard drive) and see if they are there?
And if they are, copy them onto the computer.

I doubt the poster would be this concerned if the photos were on an external sdcard, it sounds like they were saving to the internal storage.

Obviously if they are then it's just a simple case of taking it out and coping the files onto a computer.
 
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I don't think that is true. I have done factory resets and retained the data on the internal "SD" memory. However, I was using a custom recovery, so I'm not sure if it is applicable to the stock recovery.

I think its true if you do it from the stock android settings menu, but its definitely not true from CWM Recovery.
 
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I don't think that is true. I have done factory resets and retained the data on the internal "SD" memory. However, I was using a custom recovery, so I'm not sure if it is applicable to the stock recovery.

Stock android factory reset will delete all personal data on the internal SDCard.

So will a factory reset from stock samsung recovery. I know. :(

DO NOT FACTORY RESET.
 
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Stock android factory reset will delete all personal data on the internal SDCard.

So will a factory reset from stock samsung recovery. I know. :(

DO NOT FACTORY RESET.
Ah, good to know. Also, I know Odin can write to the phone, but can it also copy from the phone onto a computer? That might be a good way to back up the data before trying anything.
 
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Ah, good to know. Also, I know Odin can write to the phone, but can it also copy from the phone onto a computer? That might be a good way to back up the data before trying anything.

I like the idea. You have to put the phone into Download mode though. Sounds like a one-way process.

But, if CWM recovery was flashed onto the phone, it could possibly be accessed via ADB from the PC?
 
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Hi again all,

I've just moved house and the hotspot broadband has given me limited internet access...

Thank you all for your kind replies. I'm reluctant to try anything suggested as I dont want to lose our pics. Are there any methods above that will definitely not wipe the phone?

Just to put you guys in the picture - I must be the unluckiest Samsung customer alive. This is my 4th phone in as many weeks. O2 keep sending me reconditioned models that have had all sorts of problems. This being the worst. Unfortunately, the phone arrived a couple of days before we flew out for our wedding, so I had no time to get an SD card. How I am now regretting that decision. So, the pics are all stored to the phones internal memory. I thought 16GB should hold me for two weeks!

Samsung support have recommended taking it to a service centre - they provided details of several today. Any thoughts on this?

A quick update. Since the battery has drained with the phone switching on and off, it now does not start at all. The only sign of life is the grey battery picture when you plug the phone in.

It has been suggested to me by an O2 guru that the power button is stuck on. Any idea how I would fix this. He said that he had seen similar before. So, no progress as yet and it looks like our pics could be lost...

Thanks again. You have all been very kind. Again, any help at all would be gratefully received.

Kind Regards,

Joe.
 
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Just my two cents. Copy all the data on the device. You may need to seek out a forensic specialist. There are several law enforcement programs (and now civialian variants) that can copy all contents from a phone in a couple of minutes. US police routinely copy the contents of cell phones of arrested individuals (depending on the type of arrest) Many countries secretly copy cell phone contents of foreign nationals coming into the country (if they take your phone to examine out of your sight, they are copying it :) Without getting into all the details - a secondary market opened up and many private companies will do the same thing for a fee. You may need to do a little searching. Even if the phone is completely dead the data can still be recovered. Look for computer forensic specialists that advertise being able to recover computer data from failed drives. They should be able to help you.
 
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Flashing firmware from here with Odin doesn't wipe your phone.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1671969

The battery probably won't charge in the phone in that state, so you'll probably need an external charger or if you know someone with a gs3 charge it in their phone. Once your phone has power hopefully you'll be able to get it into download mode.
 
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Hi again guys. It's desperattion stage now!

I have tried to flash using the Odin link above and all seemed to be going well... Until it got near completion and there was a message in Odin along the lines of 'Cannot find pit file or partition'. Then FAIL! Any thoughts on how to proceed? Or a way around this issue? Any other methods I can try? Basically, anything that will stop me putting a gun to my head and just ending the torment!

Thanks again for all of your help and advice.

Kind Regards,

Joe.
 
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