Totally dead screen, need data recovery?!

[Tiribulus]

I have a customer's phone with a totally black and unresponsive screen, but the phone is on. I get the notification sound on my pc when I plug it in and it shows up as an empty drive because it's not signed in.

Smart switch sees it, but complains about no usb transfer mode and the phone beeps telling me it sees smartswitch, but no response to tapping around on the black screen.

Picture a running computer with no monitor attached.

This person has some audio files that they desperately need to recover.

No SD card, no cloud backup, no backup at all of any kind and no way to control the phone in any way that I know of.

If there's no way to do it, just tell me that please and please don't offer solutions that the strangling limitations I've just noted have already ruled out. I've been researching this for an hour.

Any help would be enormously appreciated.
Thanks.

EDIT: Oh yeah. This is a Samsung A51

 

[Tiribulus]

Oops

 

[Dannydet]

You'd have to take it to a repair shop to fix the screen issue, nothing else I can think of.

 

[Hadron]

That's the simplest solution, and possibly the only one.

I did once manage to recover data from a phone with a dead screen using a USB keyboard, at one point a USB mouse, and an MHL connector to mirror to an external display. But it was a right royal pain, since you could only connect one of those things at a time to the USB port, so you could see where you'd got to, then switch to the keyboard and try to perform the next operation using the cursor and enter keys, then switch back to see whether it worked, etc. And I had another phone with me that was sufficiently similar that I could practice some of the operations, such as unlocking the screen, before trying it on the phone with the broken screen. Luckily it used a PIN for the lockscreen, which could be entered using the cursor and enter keys (numerical keys on the keyboard did not work): had it used a pattern I don't know whether I could have done it.

If you wanted to try that the question is whether that phone would do mirroring over a USB-C to HDMI cable without having to enable it in some menu? MHL worked without needing any interaction, just plug in and it was automatic, but Samsung haven't supported that for a long time, and I've never tried USB-C to HDMI since most people use wireless casting these days. But if that doesn't work without you interacting with the phone you have no chance of doing this, and even if it does it is hard work.

(The real breakthrough was when I managed to pair it with a bluetooth keyboard, which meant I could operate it and see what I was doing at the same time. But pairing involved using a mouse for one operation the keyboard couldn't do, and using a USB mouse when the screen is black is no fun at all...).

 

[Kinghootz]

look into SCRCPY if your already on a wifi and think you might have Enabled adb over TCP/IP on your device if so you may be able to mirror USB C to USB A then switch to wireless mirroring with ur pc.. I got all the steps completed with just a tiny bit of the corner of my screen that was fine + a mouse with usbc adapter.. defiantly no chance if u dont have TCP/IP already enabled its in an impossible spot to do 100% blind