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Access Droid that won't unlock without erasing it?

phoenix1822

Lurker
Jul 29, 2011
9
3
I have an old Motorola Droid 1 (A855) that I wanted to turn on and check the contents of. The problem is a majority of the display doesn't work and I cannot unlock it. Is there a way to plug the phone into a computer and manually import data on it or some kind of emulator that I can use to manually manipulate the display?
I don't know if there was any kind of encryption that is on the phone that prevents data from being retrieved unless it's unlocked. Picture attached of how far the unlock slider will go. Any help is appreciated.

When I plug it into the computer it says "USB Debugging Connected"

PS - I am on a Mac (but have an old PC running windows 7 somewhere), and disk utility does not see the phone, but the system report does: https://imgur.com/download/BJJrc33

PPS - I tried using Vysor and Apowermirror to try to access it and neither can connect to it.
 

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If you had debugging enabled you could access it with adb commands, but otherwise, with a defective screen, I don't think there's much you can do, unfortunately.

Hey lunatic59, I believe debugging is enabled (is that what this means?):

When I plug it into the computer it says "USB Debugging Connected"
 
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Cool. Then you'll need adb minimal at least to access the phone and the drivers for the phone.

You can get that here:

https://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2588979

Unplug your phone from your pc, install adb and the universal drivers, reboot the PC and then plug in the phone. It should find them and in the Windows Device Manager you should see a new listing for "Android Phone". The definitive test would be to open up a command prompt, change to the folder where you installed adb and type
Code:
adb devices
If your phone is recognized then you will see a serial number for connected device.

Because this phone is so old, you might need to track down an older version of adb for it to work. There's no telling, until you try.
 
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Cool. Then you'll need adb minimal at least to access the phone and the drivers for the phone.

You can get that here:

https://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2588979

Unplug your phone from your pc, install adb and the universal drivers, reboot the PC and then plug in the phone. It should find them and in the Windows Device Manager you should see a new listing for "Android Phone". The definitive test would be to open up a command prompt, change to the folder where you installed adb and type
Code:
adb devices
If your phone is recognized then you will see a serial number for connected device.

Because this phone is so old, you might need to track down an older version of adb for it to work. There's no telling, until you try.


Awesome thank you so much, do you know if there is any way to do this on a Mac?
 
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Do you know what you are looking for? Your basic linux file commands will work if you open an adb shell.

Try something like:
Code:
 adb shell
ls /sdcard

Then you'd use adb pull [source path] [destination path] something like
Code:
 adb pull /sdcard/DCIM/camera/photo.jpg c:\users\[yourname]\Desktop\prehistoricphone\photo.jpg

You can review the file commands and adb options here http://adbshell.com/
 
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