Help Mount as drive letter for Recuva recovery

fireman949 · Jul 1, 2013

This all started when the poorly designed USB charger port failed on our Evo 4G LTE. We had a lot of pictures and video from the past year, the phones are $0.10/dozen so the goal was to recover pictures, but the phone wasn't able to connect via USB. HTC in their infinite wisdom made it (almost) impossible to use the extra SD Card for default location to save pictures and video.

I found a reputable eBay repair shop and sent off the phone. They did a good job on the repair, but to my dismay, when I powered up the phone, it was reset to factory. An angry email later, they said the phone was in "recovery mode" and forced them to factory reset in order to test. I could point out that nothing in the auction mentioned they would need to factory reset the phone and that all of our data would be lost, but that doesn't matter at this point (other than for feedback purposes).

I downloaded Recuva but the phone does not show up as a drive letter and from what I'm reading, is set to MTP and is not able for security reasons to show up as a drive letter.

Is there any hope of recovering our pictures?

For reference, I'm a Linux System Engineer so if major hacking is involved, details or a link and I can probably make it happen. I'd love to recover these pictures, but the possibilities are looking slim.

EarlyMon · Jul 1, 2013

Welcome to the forums!

Were you able to find the Camera setting for storage for future issues?

If they updated you to the latest revision, Jellybean, then you won't have USB Mass Storage (ums) any more. That's an Android-wide change.

MTP support and ease of use is Linux distribution dependent. Before you could only get it if you were Minty fresh, but I recall that the latest Ubuntu includes it.

I hate MTP, it's a Microsoft protocol, so I use two slower but highly effective transfer methods that aren't platform dependent, plus they're free. For ease of use and no thinking, AirDroid. Normally, an ftp server on the phone. Find those in the Play Store. For Linux, I simply don't bother playing the MTP game but your mileage may vary.

Sorry I can't offer advice on Recuva. If it requires UMS and you're on Jellybean, it's not going to happen.

Also sorry about your port breakdown, we haven't seen that as a common complaint so many here won't necessarily agree that it's a problem - but everyone's mileage varies, so I'm sorry that bit you. Hardware defects suck.

fireman949 · Jul 1, 2013

EarlyMon said:
Were you able to find the Camera setting for storage for future issues?

If they updated you to the latest revision, Jellybean, then you won't have USB Mass Storage (ums) any more. That's an Android-wide change.

Sorry I can't offer advice on Recuva. If it requires UMS and you're on Jellybean, it's not going to happen.

I found the storage settings for camera - was that always there or did that happen in a recent update? I seem to remember when I got her the phone I tried to find how to make the SD Card the default storage for cameras and several forums indicated it was not possible (this was a while back) so I gave up and this is the unfortunate result.

Recuva does require UMS in order to work, but I don't have to use that - is there any software that will recover a formatted internal storage on a phone running JellyBean?

Is there any way I can downgrade to one that supports UMS? I couldn't find the details, but I assume the storage is soldered to the phone? I don't care about the phone itself at this point, I just want the pictures and video.

marctronixx · Jul 1, 2013

im not as smart as early so i need to ask some questions.. :eek:

are these phones rooted?

and so i understand, you have files on memory card that you want to transfer to computer? or are they on the internal storage of the phone?

are you using a mac or pc?

if the files were on the phones internal storage and the phone was factory reset, they are ore then likely lost.

if they are on the sd card, then you may be good, you just need to get the computer to see the card...

'course i could be misinterpreting your entire post....

fireman949 · Jul 1, 2013

Hi Marc,

Sorry for the confusion.

The pictures and movies were on the internal phone storage. The folks that replaced the USB Charge port claimed the phone was in "recovery mode" so they had to do a hard reset. This returned the device to factory settings including removing the pictures.

I'd like to think the files are there and can be recovered with the right software, but with the Android software only supporting MTP and removing UMS, I'm running into a bit of a jam.

I'm attempting the recovery in a Windows 7 VM (VirtualBox), but I have a MacPro 10.8.2 with VMs for Windows 7 and CentOS/RedHat Linux. If it is possible to downgrade the phone to something that supports UMS, I can use software like Recuva to deep scan the phone storage for missing / deleted files.

EarlyMon · Jul 1, 2013

Side note for future reference here -

Get our Android mini software developers kit, and use the Android debug bridge to make a full backup of both internal and external sd storage in one shot over USB.

Good for Windows, Mac and Linux -

http://androidforums.com/faqs/697582-backup-routine-us-all.html

Made for the reasonably-technically inclined crowd, root not required.

~~~~~~~

The storage option in the camera was always there, but too many were unfamiliar with the new camera layout or confused our phone with the One X. Some forums were more confused than ours so some bad advice got out

EarlyMon · Jul 1, 2013

You can root and downgrade to ICS, but you'll still be stuck.

You'll get UMS access to the external sd card only - internal storage will still be MTP only.

No way past that, sorry.

hina04 · Sep 10, 2017

kindly share if you found some solution. i am having same issue with huawei y6 ii cell

Hadron · Sep 10, 2017

This thread is 4 years old, and was about a device that was so old that it had originally supported USB mass storage. Anything more recent has never had software that supported that protocol, so the options discussed above will not apply to more modern devices,

I don't think there is any my of using recuva on the internal storage of a recent phone.

Help Mount as drive letter for Recuva recovery

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