Bootlooping/bricked XT876 – possible to save the contents of /mnt/sd/?

[ch0ppr0k]

I turned my old DROID3 on recently after having left it in its night dock for about 8 hours charging, same as I've done with the thing for the 6 months until that morning, when the phone went into an irrecoverable bootloop.
By "irrecoverable" I mean VZW said there was no way at all to recover any data whatsoever tough bananas kid the sd card is removeable except that it's not so why didn't you back up your sd card to your external sd card every day? (Somehow some of these guys got a penchant for sounding stupid as rocks while making you feel somehow dumber, & it's been over a year since I entered a VZW store w/o a little bit of the red mist descending.

(at least for once getting a new one was no problem; VZWers around RVA simply need look to the east end of 295... & the BS stops there! Mechanicsville is like heaven compared to every other store I ever been into

So here's my question: what do I need to do to save the data off the internal sd card /mnt/sd/... ? I've given up on everything else, I just would like to be able to image and/or merge the data on there with the data on here, my new Droid 3.

The old D3 is so damaged that the VZW techs between Petersburg & DC are all flummoxed, brain-damaged, paid to act like it, or know more than they're letting on. I've found my way into the boot-recovery option menus using the power & volume-down key/power & both-volume-keys tricks with plenty of success: once I reach there, though, I'm lost.

I would post more details (& will post more gladly in exchange for yr generous assistance in salvaging what VZW ought to be doing for free (or at least Motorola … this wasn't an issue when there really was only one SD card. I'm used to a Kafkaesque bureaucracy of victim-blaming, but there's only so far they can push this). To repeat: my phone is bricked; nothing works except the menus accessible via the power & volume buttons. Those work fine.

I just want the contents of my /mnt/sd/… folder back in my hands. There are company secrets, other info that VZW is being dangerously cavalier with. I know this isn't the place to ask for a complaint line where someone actually takes those complaints & at least pretends like my time has some sort of value, or that their malfunctioning products' fault's having cost me lots upon lots of money… It would be nice for VZW to at least start to pretend they care if their customers live or die or not. When my old DROID2 was on its last legs & posed a genuine health threat (if I have a medical emergency & it takes 10 mins to dial 911 & then reboots, then don't expect my boss to just pay out workman's comp & shut up. The D3 has been a dream in that respect; dial and it dials like a real phone! No minutes of lag!

Lastly I apologize for rambling & I apologize for the vagueness of my complaint/request -- I will be keeping an eye on this all day, & I've scuppered the day socially so that I can hopefully recover that SD card's data intact. Heck, even if I screwed something up & can only pick at scraps, I'll take those. I can image the drive and try and practice my forensic analysis/recovery techniques.

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Apologies for the newbieneshness, I'm not from around these parts.
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[Shimmy549]

You tried power button + m key and selected Normal Boot, or whatever the first option is called?

Unfortunately, with most of your data residing on the internal sd, you would need to be able to boot into the operating system to access it. The same would probably apply to Verizon.

Any phone-related program that you'd run on your computer-RadioComm, ADB or any of the Development Kit tools-needs to detect your phone and/or install drivers to communicate and work with your phone. Those programs wouldn't be able to detect your phone from recovery. Your phone would have to be able to boot into the OS.

I don't think Verizon is messing with you here. You'll have to find a way to boot into the operating system.

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[Shimmy549]

Basically, if you can't boot into your operating system, I don't know of a program that can recognize your phone and extract files from it.

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[ch0ppr0k]

If I plug in my phone into my Windows box after bringing up the Boot Mode Selection Menu with (Power + both volume buttons) using the USB cord that comes with the D3, Windows attempts to install all kinds of drivers. I'd totally forgotten I'd even gotten that far -- if the thing was completely bricked, then I wouldn't be wasting y'all's time. I'd be too busy raising Cain with VZW/Motorola over an inherently defective product marketed as this close to water/bullet/whatever-proof, that just spontaneously eats it with no recourse for the data on board except an hourly backing-up of the full /mnt/sd/…, or, well, you're just out of luck. I've gone through 2 OG Ds, 2 D2s, 4 D2Gs in 6 weeks, and now I'm going on 6 months since a sudden, catastrophic, unpredictable, unpublicized, hardware error flatlands my machine. VZW has always blamed me, for a while the cognitive dissonance literally drove me insane (you're using antivirus software! Who told you to do that? VZW says no AV software! Except on the Android Market, or in the store. Literally, going out of their way to ensure their victim has a bad day.

I am about to boot this up using the 2x volume key & power button mode; I don't remember which one I tried before & I don't want to flash everything to nowheresville so I'll wait for some advice before proceeding. My options: (following v 0A.5S bootmenu, or whatever it just read)
Normal Powerup
Recovery
AP fastboot
BP SBF Flash
BP Only
BP HW Diag & Boot AP
BP Tools

Booting into "Recovery" gets me an existential-looking DROID next to a 3-D DANGER sign.

One of those other buttons gets me a list of protocols that are definitely some sort of transfer protocols.

Yet another does the same, only six of them instead of 3 or 4. No names for them yet, but they're definitely communications protocols.

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[Shimmy549]

Do the drivers actually install? The computer may recognize that a USB device has been connected to it, but does it ever recognize that it's your phone (anything "Motorola" show up)?

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[Shimmy549]

The fact that your computer knows something is connected gives me a glimmer of hope, but I'm staying cautiously optimistic,

You DID try the "Normal" boot (first option), right?

Sorry if my responses are short or delayed. I'm at work.

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[ch0ppr0k]

Did try normal first, @ AP Fastboot Flash Mode now, Android ADP drivers came up. Trouble IDing phone as a Motorola, & installing ADP drivers. ADP/JDK/etc isn't installing right at the moment. There are signs of my PC recognizing the D3 in a former life.

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[ch0ppr0k]

I've got ADB installing at the moment, going to try and get to the sd card through there.
Right now, my DROID is showing up in device manager as ANDROID_PHONE/Android ADB Interface. It was showing up as such before I even discovered ADB. Probably came up last night when I plugged in the first time
The Rollback Driver Node Strong Name (thanks Windows!) is something along the lines of: oem134.inf:Motorola.NTamd64:motandroidusb .Dev: 1.2.7.0:usb\vid_22b8&pid_42d1

So it looks to me like the guts of an Android filesystem lie within the husk of this DROID 3. I'm running on a Win7x64 Ultimate machine right now; I can move to Ubuntu 11.10 x64 instantaneously, if this would be easier on Linux. Just don't say I'm doomed, or that I need a Mac!

ADB is being very slow to install; this whole system needs a reboot but I'm fearful of upsetting some cosmic balance right now.

And now ADB is installed and Windows isn't recognizing a thing. I'm setting a restore point, closing down windows, turning off the phone, & starting fresh. The surface has barely been scratched.

Any advice is welcome on how to salvage my old DROID 3. Motorola needs to stop engineering in fail-points where failsafes should go. At the VZW store it's always about my not being the best user ever, which is someone who gets a phone that's on the bleeding edge and then uses it to check the clock once a while. Even that's subject to the VZW inquisition if something breaks. I don't know if this is a good sign or not, but Generic Guy at VZW Store chirpily said even though his store couldn't (wouldn't) do anything to fix my phone but I "could probably get the answer on the forums".

I'm counting on y'all! Make my Christmas eve a de-lurking to remember!

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[Shimmy549]

When you say Windows isn't recognizing anything, do you mean it isn't recognizing your phone in the USB port or in Device Manager, or that it isn't allowing you to use ADB?

I don't know if you ever used ADB before, but you'll either have to use it through the Command Prompt (as administrator: CTRL+Shift+Enter), or by changing that path variable that's a few clicks throug the "Computer" menu.
I really don't know if ADB will be able to interact with your phone, but if you get it working, you will have the ability to attempt to reboot or fastboot. You'll also have the option to reboot the bootloader. I have some hope, though. I know that, when I reboot a phone when I'm connected to the SDK or ADB, they don't recognize the phone again until it has booted back up. Maybe whatever went wrong with your phone appears more serious than it really is.

I've heard of similar problems and there IS a way to get your phone back (probably), but the potential solution would wipe you clean.

Keep me posted.

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[Shimmy549]

Are you installing ADB with or without the SDK? I've always installed them together. For a one-shot deal like this, you could probably just use CMD.exe instead of messing with the variable.

You might not have to mess with it, anyway. Like I said, I always did it one certain way. I'm not good at thinking outside of the box

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[ch0ppr0k]

Sorry, I meant to fill you in before I skitterred off for some holiday pleasantries. The ADP and SDK went on as a singular unit, however Google packages them for distribution. Since I was using either the last of the versions of the releases in the 6.xx series of Java SDKs, or else the very latest of version 7 Java SDK, the Android Debug Bridge (more hits for other n00bs wondering "WTF is ADB" right there), so it started off rather stickily as I had to click through an ominous-seeming "Yes, I do have JSK or JDK or whatever it's called that I need" "... Are you sure? People you love may die if you make the wrong decision. Is Java cool or isn't it? If you called the cops, the deal's off, the phone is dead. " / "No, I don't have Java SDK 6 or 7 yet. I'll be right here next time we do business, everything's cool, man! "- triad of buttons. Eventually I chose the "pretend you've got JSDK set up just like we said, or else don't blame us... " button & proceeded to compile stuff.
It took a while to compile... Whatever I compiled. I would have to look back through again. But the ADP/SDK kit seemed a functional whole, until I started trying to get the system to recognize my phone. At some point it started to get social. I came back to my workstation to find that the phone showed up as a generic ADP modem-y thing under Device Manager. Perhaps more interesting? Previous driver? A Motorola OEM one. I have the name elsewhere.

I never did get ADP to identify anything attached to the PC, although the computer itself has identified stuff for sure, & knows what it is. I also have a virginal Ubuntu 11.10 x64 system to go swimming around with if need be.

That's just the "A" menu of stuff! When I tried something from the "B" list of boot options, Windows installed 5 or 6 different interface protocols. It was groping around trying to communicate with something it didn't quite understand the subtleties of as a being. (Images, rather naughty, of Windows getting jabbed, kicked, spit upon, & otherwise treated like I usually do whenever members of the opposite sex come nearby. Or tourists fresh off busses from overseas. I feel like the second part of the menu might have the answer i'm looking for, after all, which is to get that "sd" data off intact[ish] of my DROID3. For those just tuning in, my phone went meta-brick, it wouldn't even accept a factory reset. This great new DROID3 is a suitable replacement; it's only that there's proprietary data & stuff that it's easier to try and learn how to vivisection your dying DROID than it is to hire a professional or end up in a state hospital/jail after VZW's conceptual-art installation about the contemptuousness with which modern late capitalism has inured the worker to accept as normal. I don't know what that last part meant, kudos to anyone who can explain it to me in the morning.

Point is, I want my /sd/ stuff relatively intact & i don't care how!

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[Shimmy549]

Shot in the dark here.

You said your computer recognizes your phone even though ADP doesn't. Your computer knows your phone is a USB device. Your phone has an internal SD.

I'm wondering if SD card recovery software would be able to detect your phone's internal SD and extract files from it.

Just a suggestion.

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[ch0ppr0k]

Shimmy: How would I get the phone to interface with the internal memory w/o using the ADK? Is there some way i'm missing to directly interface w/ the SD card?
I haven't had much time to try what i'm doing today because of the holiday, but I'll continue to try what I've been suggested & what I've researched to get at the data.

I suppose the real question is: how do I interface with that data, and then how do I transfer the contents of the media upon which the data resides to something that isn't a brick? I don't mind getting my hands dirty; I need to recover (& clean off) the data that is trapped on that phone. Had I known from the start that this catastrophic, sudden, massive failure with no precedent or warning, and no means of recovery whatsoever was a possibility, I wouldn't have accepted the risk/benefit ratio. Now, I put mission-critical data in a cloud-backed folder or store it offline, but this whole debacle should never have happened in the first place. I've recovered data from bricked phones before; from HDs that have suffered physical damage, from USB drives that've been through multiple read/write cycles. None of it has taken this much work! And when the damage has been, as it is in this case, the result of a manufacturer-side screwup, I've never been treated with the kind of disposable contempt that Verizon has shown towards me. When I say "disposable", I mean in the sense of my being disposable, that my complaint is so petty that it's an insult to VZW for even have to waste their time, making up problems that don't exist, except they do, and once they do, the problem is so obviously my fault that I ought to be ashamed for expecting anything except a thrashing from store staff. The phone support is nonexistent - I have never dealt with this before, and I am utterly clueless as to what recourse I have.

I don't know of any other company operating that would give me a defective product, tell me I can probably fix it (& implicitly, that they could, but just don't want to waste the time or trouble, as if this were a missing button on the keyboard; a minor irritant blown out of proportion by some hysterical, malingering troublemaker). This isn't the forum for any more of that line of discourse, but it does trouble me that Verizon & Motorola can get away with this sort of insulting, contemptuous, ultimately worse-than-no-help-at-all "help". At least if I couldn't be fobbed off with a new phone & the tacit promise of full data recovery, I wouldn't be facing a ticking clock towards an $500 fee for returning the bricked phone late while trying to salvage what I can from the thing.

The data is inches from my nose, any & all means to access it that won't void the warranty completely or cause bodily harm, I'm welcome to hearing. Until I have a positive answer for y'all as to whether the data survived or not, there have got to be some forums out there other than this great one to spread the word & warn people in advance, because VZW & Motorola clearly won't man up & acknowledge any sort of fault in their products except for the most facile - when it counts.

So please, keep those suggestions coming. If VZW wants to charge me for holding onto my phone, I'll charge them my usual per-hour rate for data recovery & forensics work plus a retainder for the extra trouble of having to learn (almost, thanks so, so, so much for the help!) unaided how to work a proprietary OS/ I/O system. It will add up to much more than anything they care to fling at me. As for forum denizens, forgive the rant, & keep ideas flowing!



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[Shimmy549]

This is my line of thinking:

Your computer can detect your phone when your phone is connected to a USB port. I've never used SD card recovery software before, but I wonder if that kind of program could detect your phone's internal SD, seeing as the computer detects your phone. The recovery program would run on your computer, so I'm pretty sure it could detect an sd card that's inside a phone connected to the computer.

Your phone is sort of inaccessible, though. That's the most likely limitation.

The only reasonably-legitimate program I know of (Asoftech) costs $39.95 (PRO version that can find more than just photo files). There are programs that are advertised as free, but I'd be afraid to download any of them.

I'm still looking into this. If there was a free download available through a reliable source-like cnet-I'd tell you to just try it. Unfortunately, that's a pipe dream. I'm in the process of trying to find out if anyone has ever tried this and what happened.

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[xaelith]

Since the computer is recognizing the phone one way or another WITHOUT adb/the sdk, i'd say there's at least a glimmer of hope for data recovery (regardless of what your local VZW hacks...erm, i mean "customer service agents"... are telling you. Try hooking it up to the ubuntu machine and see what it says. I've heard tell that some members of the modding community prefer and reccommend linux machines because fewer programs are needed to play around with the innards of the phones. If the windows system recognized the phone as at least a motorola device before you installed the SDK, then i would assume the linux machine will go a step further.

I think the point the other poster was trying to make is that with the windows machine getting as far as it did before the SDK was installed, you might be able to use a generic SD card recovery program to recover the data...in other words, just treat the phone as if it were one big malfunctioning SD card (which if i'm understanding your plight correctly, isn't too far off the mark). Anyway, try those suggestions, and keep us posted. Best wishes, and good luck