Q&A: Mobile Phone Recovery 

This week we’re discussing problems our customer’s are having with their mobile phones.
(Remember there are plenty more help and advice pages that you can find here)

Lost Pics On An Android LG Phone

Using android LG phone to take pictures and store on the phones internal memory. The phone became stuck when saving a picture and crashed. Upon recovery of phone the pictures were not visible in the phone any more.
An old android OS (Android 2.0.4 Gingerbread) can detect the pictures. However it says the memory requires formatting. Attempting to format does not work.
Attempting to access phones memory through the older phone connected to windows PC the drive is visible but inaccessible. The drive shows up in disk management as size 0 bytes.
Attempting to use chkdsk to fix the device windows returns the message “unable to open volume for direct access”.
Attempting to use Recuva and similar software has similar and unsuccessful error responses.
I wish to recover holiday photos and videos.

Sounds like there’s either some kind of data corruption or a faulty memory chip on this phone.

  • Data corruption because the symptoms (requires formatting and reporting as size 0 bytes) are typical types of error message when there is a problem with the data or Android OS rather than the device itself.
  • Faulty chip because a message like “unable to open volume for direct access”, the phone becoming stuck and the format command failing are symptoms of a hardware failure probably to do with the LG phone’s memory chip.

As long as the data still exists on your phone and has not been overwritten we should be able to recover it for you. The software approach that you have been using will only ever get you so far. Using the techniques of JTAG and Chip Off (which are both hardware based and therefore bypass software restrictions) will give us a considerably highly likelihood of getting your photos and videos back. Find out more about our Android recovery services here.

Retrieving Deleted Messages on A Samsung Galaxy Note 3

Hello, I have been a victim of fraud. My Samsung note 3 was set to “delete old messages” and the police would like to take my phone and retrieve a conversation of many hundreds of messages beginning in June this year. I believe the police will need my phone for many weeks so I am looking at paying a company to do it for me more quickly. Can you carry out this service so it would be appropriate for evidence to prosecute someone? How long would you need my phone for? And how much does this service cost?

We work with many police forces and know that they all have significant backlogs in examining mobile phones. Should the police take your phone for forensic examination, it will unfortunately join a very long queue and you probably won’t see your phone again for months. Fortunately, we are also able to carry out forensic investigations on phones that follow the required legal procedures necessary to extract evidence in a way that it can be used for court prosecutions. Unlike the police service which takes months, ours takes days to complete. To provide an accurate cost please contact us as there’s not a ‘one size fits all’ figure. The Samsung Note 3 phone you have is a popular model and we are able to use a variety of techniques to retrieve your message – see our Samsung phone page here.

Do You Need To Retrieve Data From A Mobile Phone ?

We retrieve all types of data (contacts, messages, phone calls, photos, movies, GPS mapping, documents, downloads, App data, deleted data etc etc) from all types of mobile phone. Give us a call or leave us a message and we’ll contact you.