My phone has been locked by some ransomware which pretends to be the police and tells me I’ve been looking at very bad grot, but that they’ll leave me alone if I pay a £100 fine.

A quick bit of googling throws up a few guides to get rid but they rely on starting the phone in safe mode – something my ageing Huawei P1 doesn’t appear to have.

Does anyone know if I’ve got any options other than a data wipe/factory reset? I think most of the important stuff is on the sd card which I can remove first but I’m not sure what else I might lose so I would like to avoid it if possible.

Any bright ideas? Would I be still be able to back up the phone data by usb cable to pc or would plugging it into the laptop be a very bad idea?

http://consumer.huawei.com/en/support/products/faqs/detail/g610-en.htm?id=19175 for getting into safe mode.

Is this how to enable safe mode on a P1?

http://consumer.huawei.com/en/support/products/faqs/detail/g610-en.htm?id=19175

Once you’re in safe mode I think it should be straightforward to remove.

Unfortunately that doesn’t work on my phone. The best I can do is recovery mode where I get to chose between:

Reboot system now
Apply update from external storage
Wipe data/factory reset
Wipe cache partition
Apply update from cache