Samsung Galaxy S3 will not turn on. Can this be fixed or can I retrieve photos?

Question

My Samsung Galaxy SIII is doing the following: I cannot get the phone to turn on, the side power button does not do anything. When I remove the battery, and put it back in place, the phone vibrates once and then displays the startup screen of "Samsung Galaxy SIII" for two seconds, before going black again. The battery of the phone is charged. I have tried connecting the device to a power source and it doesn't do anything.

Is there something I can do to fix the phone/get it to turn on?

Is there a way for me to recover photos/notes stored on the phone's internal hard drive?

Answer 1

If you have a micro SD card in the phone, that can be taken out, put in an adapter and read by any computer with an SD card reader. Recovering data from the internal memory is much harder. If you can't get the phone to power on, there is no way to recover data from the internal memory. When I had a similar problem with my Galaxy S3, I had it repaired by MobileTechVideos. They did a good job for me. It was cheaper than a new phone. I didn't pay for the data recovery, though since I kept my data backed up to the cloud.

Answer 2

It actually is possible to recover data from the phone's internal storage, but it's likely to be too costly to be practical, unless you have the only known photo of the space aliens in there. What would be required, once all methods of getting the phone to boot and transfer the files have failed, is to desolder the internal Flash RAM chip from the phone's motherboard, then use an appropriate adapter (mount/socket and circuits) to read out the contents.

This is difficult because desoldering surface mount chips without damage requires specialized tools, and the equipment to read out a dismounted chip is pretty uncommon. Forensic data recovery specialists would likely have the right hardware and skills, but it's unlikely anyone else would have all of it in one place.

Commercial repair of the phone is almost certain to involve replacing the motherboard, which will lose your internal data storage (the Flash RAM chip will still be on the old motherboard, which will likely be recycled for the metal content, i.e. shredded and melted down).

Answer 3

You can dump out the parts by some commands in ubuntu. it works even when its off: ls -al /dev do this for alllll partitions and then extract them: dd if=/dev/partname of=/external_SD