My old S4 is broken, screens in a bazillion bits. It turns on, but only for a minute or so and not long enough to send any pics to flickr or elsewhere, which brings me onto what I need to do.

Can I connect to a PC and read the photos off the SD card without the phone being on? Obviously I know the passcode but can’t (AFAIK) put the card in the PC, it can only be read from the phone because it’s encrypted?

Is there any way I can get the pics off the phone?

Pissed off because I bought a NAS/cloud hard drive when we moved house, but it went back in it’s box while we re-decorated and I never actually backed anything up off the phone!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 3 years of snaps 😥

can’t (AFAIK) put the card in the PC

I’d try this first.

Comes up as inaccessible/no data because it’s encrypted. That was my first hope.

Anyone here work at the FBI?

You have to actively select encryption I believe, so it’s worth trying it in the pc unless you’ve definitely done this.

EDIT: Ah.

Yep, it popped up as an option when the phone was new, so I ticked the box 🙁

Have you checked to see if the phone has automatically backed them up in to Google photos?

Yep, nothing like that set up 🙁

Thinking outside the box, as I know the passcode is there some sort of phone emulator software that could read the phone/card?

Can you put the sd card into another handset and see if it will play along?

I don’t know about encryption but am fairly sure Linux provides loads of tools for mounting encrypted data partitions etc.

Might help to know if Samsung used a standard encryption method for the S4?

Use some low level tool to make a backup of the encypted partitions so you’ve got something to experiment with without fear of losing data for good.

Try these guys http://www.cellebrite.com 🙂

How long does it stay on for if you connect it up to your pc?
I’ve “recovered” stuff that way. (Pulled it off the memory card)

Andyroid is a free android emulator, don’t know if you could do anything with that?

the developer software might do the trick?

https://developer.android.com/index.html

you could try asking on the XDA forums perhaps?

http://forum.xda-developers.com/

I think your in trouble. There are ways to unlock passwords using developer tools, but you would have to have enabled USB debugging before hand.

One other way worth trying is to plug in a USB keyboard via a USB otg cable. Boot phone and enter passcode. This might sound crazy but I can plug a mouse into my phone using one and I getva little mouse pointer on my screen. Otg cables can be got on amazon for about a pound.

What about getting the screen fixed? Lots of backstreet places doing it pretty cheaply. Probably not cost effective for that phone but you should get your pictures back (which you will back up straight away!) and you get a spare phone

fix phone>download pics*>wipe>ebay

*the shop may do this too – what’s on it?

I can get into the phone and find the photos, the screen still works as far as that, the issue is it crashes before I can upload them to anything, I can’t figure out if it’s an app crashing it or hardware (moneys on hardware) but it always crashes and dies after about a minute.

Pretty sure the USB part is dead too, it seems to charge fine, but appears to have an iffy connection when trying to connect to a pc. So pretty much the only way will be to do something with the SD card.

Think that means it’s dead 🙁

Tried starting it in safe mode, that’ll at least establish if its hardware or software killing it.

Which version of Android is it on?

How do I do that?

(5.something)

If you can get into the phone, why not just disable the encryption?

http://www.samsung.com/ie/support/skp/faq/933279

If you can get into the phone, why not just disable the encryption?

Doesn’t work backwards, encrypting turns the memory to gibberish, so the only way to un-encrypt it is to copy those files out once they’re open.

Software version:
Settings/scroll to bottom

I was just thinking if you knew the version, maybe you can crack it over USB…but you have to switch
DEBUG OVER USB
on

Would the card be readable in another S4, if you could borrow one, or is it encrypted to your phone only?

Would the card be readable in another S4, if you could borrow one, or is it encrypted to your phone only?

It’s done by the phone so no it can’t work like that either.

I’ll try safe mode tonight and if that doesn’t work I think it’s probably a dead end short of having the phone repaired.

Lesson learnt, encrypt the phone but setup a backup for photos and sentimental stuff!

If they have any sense, which they will have, it will be encrypted to your phone only. Dropping it in another S4 won’t work.

thisisnotaspoon – Member

I can get into the phone and find the photos, the screen still works as far as that, the issue is it crashes before I can upload them to anything, I can’t figure out if it’s an app crashing it or hardware (moneys on hardware) but it always crashes and dies after about a minute.

Before it crashes, do you have a chance to do anything at all?
If you do, then can you just uninstall all apps and see if that solves the crashing problem?

Or start it in safe mode so none of the apps start.