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I'm working for my university's CS Department, and we've got a Digital Forensics project which requires us to create a one-to-one .dd image of a T-Mobile Galaxy S3 (Jellybean 4.1), so that we can recover some deleted data. I've done some Googling, and called Samsung, but I haven't been able to find any way to create an uncompressed image without rooting, and we can't root the phone without dealing with some legal ramifications.

Does anyone know of a program that can get the image without rooting?

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It's impossible to obtain block level access to a block device without root, since all of those files grant the write permission only to root. At least I have never seen it any other way and I doubt that the S3 is an exception here.

It's not because it's technically impossible, the default permissions simply forbid it. A this is done for a pretty good reason: It would be a major security issue if this was possible: The normal user could get a dump of all the filesystem data.

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  • Damn. I'll keep the question open for a bit, just in case anyone has a work-around. Thanks for the response!
    – Chance
    Commented Feb 18, 2013 at 23:00
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    np, but I doubt that you will hear any other answer because of the reasons I added with my edit.
    – Flow
    Commented Feb 18, 2013 at 23:05
  • If there will be another response, it can only point to a security hole -- which hopefully then is subject for a really fast fix. For more details, you might want to take a look into Andrew Hoog's book Android Forensics and mobile security, published at Elsevier (German version by Franzis) and available e.g. on Amazon. As a forensics specialist (and chief investigator), he also had to deal with the issue you described. (Disclosure: I translated this book from English to German for Franzis)
    – Izzy
    Commented Feb 18, 2013 at 23:19
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Try Concepts like JTAG ... As far as i know, It is the only method to take a complete image of a non-rooted Device. Correct me if i'm wrong

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