You will not find information here on how to bypass passwords/codes for any device.

If the devices are locked, then you will need her credentials for those devices to unlock them legitimately before any of us can help.

 

It has to be said that her remembering her PIN or password would be by far the simplest solution.

I do have a dilemma here, because as said above posting information about bypassing security features isn't something we do here. But for many years now devices have had features designed to stop someone doing this using root (or root-adjacent) methods(*), in addition to which whether it is possible to root or otherwise modify the device and how to do that if so both depend on what device and what software it is running. So really identifying the devices is the first step, there is no generic solution here.

(*) For example the most common and simplest root method involves unlocking the bootloader. So to protect data against bad actors the act of unlocking the bootloader will erase the storage of most phones - and as all but very old phones have encrypted storage that would be game over.

 

She will surely know the Gmail email address she used, or be able to find it. After that Google will help her recover her password, though she may have changed it for the second phone. Logging in to the account on a full web browser, she will see what Devices are still associated with that account - hopefully both.
We can put links here to help.

 

Hopefully. If the devices boot and connect to the net then they should show as associated - devices that don't connect to the account for some number of months disappear from the list, but they should reappear if they log in again.

But if the problem is lockscreen password/PIN then Google won't be able to help with that, as that is different from the account password. (Actually I suppose someone could use their account password as a lockscreen password as well, but that doesn't appeal to me, and is only workable if you have a weak account password, which is not recommended).

 

@Hadron You are correct on both counts.

I just resolved to make all my mistakes for the year on the first day - so avoid South West London today.

OP ignore my post. Not enough schnapps.

 

If this is a situation where there are files residing only on these two phones that have to be recovered, I'd suggest you stop messing with them and take them to a trusted, local service shop. Experimenting with smartphones that hold vital data is a really, really risky practice. It's one thing if they're just old phones and if the data is lost it exists elsewhere. But if you make a 'mistake' trying one thing or another, that could just as easily wipe the storage media.

 

Encryption of the storage media didn't become a default until Marshmallow (vers. 6) was released in 2015. Prior to that it was a matter where we would have to go into the Settings menu and intentionally enable it. But at that time, Android hardware specs were a lot more resource-starved so depending on the phone model there could be a significant performance hit involved if you did enable it (Android was late to the game and used a software-based encryption for the internal storage media. Apple has always used encrypted media in its phones, and having control over both hardware and software development has also used a more efficient hardware/firmware encryption.)