Help! Emrgency! Reverse Remote Wipe?

[CatFer]

I thought my phone was stolen and used Android Device Manager to wipe the phone. Vodafone had already turned it off by then, and it said the device was offline but as soon as the phone is back online all data would be wiped
Now it seems the phone has been handed in and as it wasn't fully backed up I'd really, really like to reverse it somehow before turning the phone back on...any suggestions?
Thanks in advance if anyone can help

 

[lunatic59]

Assuming the device has been off the whole time and has yet to be reset, take out the sim card and take it to a place with no wifi signal.

If it can't reach a network, it can't receive the signal to reset itself. If it already got the reset, then it's probably already done and there's not much you can do. I've never erased a device through ADM, do you get a confirmation when it's done?

 

[iowabowtech]

Assuming the device has been off the whole time and has yet to be reset, take out the sim card and take it to a place with no wifi signal.

If it can't reach a network, it can't receive the signal to reset itself. If it already got the reset, then it's probably already done and there's not much you can do. I've never erased a device through ADM, do you get a confirmation when it's done?

Seems like a good idea. I don't see any other way to reverse the wipe request, though it could be out there somewhere.

Once you get the phone up and running with no sim or wifi, open the Google Settings app and uncheck the box to "allow remote lock and erase".

 

[lunatic59]

Seems like a good idea. I don't see any other way to reverse the wipe request, though it could be out there somewhere.

Once you get the phone up and running with no sim or wifi, open the Google Settings app and uncheck the box to "allow remote lock and erase".

I you get it to boot without wiping, immediately back up your important files to your PC.

Yeah, this is uncharted territory for a lot of us. I think I'm going to take an old phone I've got and remote wipe it to see what exactly happens.

I'll post back.

 

[NightAngel79]

Once you get the phone up and running with no sim or wifi, open the Google Settings app and uncheck the box to "allow remote lock and erase".

Think that is best bet. If you can boot without it wiping the device then uncheck that setting, and/or go to 'device administrators' and remove 'Android Device Manager' check box. That is the setting that allows google to wipe your control your device in this scenario

 

[lunatic59]

Okay, here's what I did ... and what happened.

The subject phone was an old Samsung Captivate (SGH-i897) that was rooted and running CM10.1. No sim card. Made a nandroid backup and copied to my laptop.

First I made sure that ADM could see it and that remote wipe was activated. Then I turned off WiFi and shut off the phone.

Once the phone was off, i issued the ADM command to erase. Next I turned off my home WiFi and made sure there were no open wifi connections within range.

I turned the phone back on and it booted normally. No network connections. At this point I could have copied all my files off via USB or used any backup apps assuming they were already installed.

I turned WiFi on on the phone and still nothing because my home WiFi was disabled and it couldn't connect to other networks. I then enabled my home WiFi and as soon as the phone connected, I see a message "erasing SD card" and then the phone rebooted, performing a factory reset. When it rebooted all internal storage was wiped clean, including the nandroid.

Now, here's the interesting part. Even though it said it was erasing the sd card, it only meant the internal /sdcard partition, because I had an external SD card with some test files on it that were still there after the reset.

And the really REALLY interesting part, I copied the nandroid backup files that I made BEFORE issuing the ADM lock and erase command back to the the phone and restored them. When the phone booted and connected to WiFi, it reset itself again.

Soooo, i copied and restored the nandroid one more time and as soon as the lockscreen showed up, I was able to swipe down and disable WiFi. All good so far. And when I re-enabled wifi on the phone and it connected, it didn't reset. The odd thing now is that the play store doesn't see it, so I may have to reset it anyway to get ADM back.