Samsung SM-A300FU Deleted Text Messages: Case Study

We recently received a Samsung SM-A300FU smart phone from a customer who wanted us to unerase deleted text messages from the phone. We were asked to concentrate on recovering these deleted messages from a couple of numbers between a certain date range.

Our phone recovery equipment fully supports all Samsung mobiles and we proceeded to connect it up to our Samsung specialist jigs. The phone arrived locked, so the first task was to bypass the user lock on this particular model before proceeding to retrieve the deleted items. Things weren’t so simple however as the phone was running Android version 5.0.2 (Lollipop) and was also using the latest firmware revision. This meant that our normal means of recovery wouldn’t work and therefore we would have to write a workaround to access the texts instead.

As our usual route was unavailable, the key to recovering the phone was to gain full administrative access to it, which would allow us bypass certain security and operating system features, thus allowing us to retrieve the data required. This is commonly done by ‘rooting’ the phone (see this Wiki link for more on rooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooting_%28Android_OS%29). Once we had rooted the phone, the required numbers were identified and the the erased messages from the date range unerased and provided to the customer.

Proceed With Caution !

There are many tutorials on the internet for rooting phones, but if you are thinking about attempting this yourself be careful as many tutorials are inaccurate while others are completely wrong. Rooting procedures vary according to the specific phone you are working on. Also, rooting not only voids any warranty your phone may have, incorrect rooting will brick a phone making it unusable (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brick_%28electronics%29).

Recover Deleted Texts

If you’d like us to retrieve the deleted texts and any other data from your phone, contact us by using the form to your right. We have a free nationwide collection service that will call round and collect your phone, safely delivering it to us the next day. Alternatively, you can call in at one of our local offices, here is Data Clinic’s main smartphone recovery page.