Help deleted pictures recovery at xperia U, android 4.0.4

[rosandcb]

Dear team,

Last week I accidentally deleted all my photos from my Sony Xperia U (ST25i, android 4.0.4, only internal sdcard/memory) but I really need them back for my studies.
I understood because I bought my phone as a early version as Android 2.3 en only upgraded it until 4.0.4, that its still possible to get my photo's back, right?
I'm not that good into the restore world of mobile devices and was trying to get it back, but I immediately run into some problems. And I hope you can help me further.

1) My phone does not appear as a drive at my pc. It just appears as Xperia U onder 'my computer', so untill now I was not able to run some pc recoveryprograms for USB mass. Do I need it to appear as a drive? Or are there also free programs I can use without that problem?

2) I tried at my phone with the: settings> Developer options > USB debugging (which is enabled) but I can't find the option at my phone menu for enabling USB mass storage mode.

3)I red that therefore do I have to root my phone first. Is that right and how?

Or do you know any photo/data recovery programs which I can run without any difficulties?

Thank you in advanced,
Rosan

 

[Rukbat]

2) I tried at my phone with the: settings> Developer options > USB debugging (which is enabled) but I can't find the option at my phone menu for enabling USB mass storage mode.

As of version 4 (IIRC) there's no more mass storage mode. It's multimedia mode or camera mode.

3)I red that therefore do I have to root my phone first.

To undelete any file from internal storage you have to root your phone.

Is that right and how?

ADB manually root almost any Android device

Or do you know any photo/data recovery programs which I can run without any difficulties?

Not unless you've already installed them. Installing one (like Disk Digger) could overwrite the very files you're trying to recover.