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Help Help with backup soft bricked phone

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pgrgrl

Lurker
Last week, my stock, non-rooted phone running 4.4.2 got stuck in a boot loop. My contacts and photos were not backed up. When I called Verizon and some other places for help and was told that the solution was going to be factory reset which would wipe my data, I did some reading to find out that it is possible to rescue my data with the proper tools. Fortunately a friend had an old S3 that I am using in the meantime.

I tried using the Samsung Galaxy S3 Unified Toolkit for Windows, but this was unsuccessful. I'm not sure why, but I suspect maybe it didn't have the proper drivers. After that, I got stuck in Odin mode. I tried to install a No-Wipe Factory Image using Odin (I got it from here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2795659). This failed with an error message that it could not write, which leads me to believe there is a permissions problem, I assume that might be because the phone is not rooted?

On my Notebook computer, I am running Ubuntu 12.04, so my next attempt was going to be to try to pull the data with adb shell. I didn't attempt this first because I am not that familiar with running linux commands and I couldn't find a "for dummies" instruction to guide me through it.

This might be a dumb question, but, is it necessary to have my SIM card in the phone to do this backup?

And, are there any easy guides for adb commands to help me through this? Will pull commands work on a non-rooted phone?

Thanks in advance.
 
If your phone is from Verizon they have software update and repair tools for most of their major brand phones. First part of the repair process automatically backs up your data. What is the model of your phone?
 
Samsung Galaxy S3 I535. But the phone is now stuck in "download mode", it will not start normally in order to do a backup. Before it got stuck in download mode, the phone would not stay on, it constantly shut down and rebooted. So the 30-90 minutes connection to run this backup was impossible.
 
Sorry I couldn't help. Maybe someone with adb experience will see your post soon. Only other thing I can think of would be Kies but I don't know if it would detect phone in a bootloop or not. I'll do some searching and if I find anything I'll post.
 
Kies didn't work either because the phone would only stay on for about 30 seconds. That was before I got it stuck in download mode. But thanks for trying to help.
 
Pulling the battery and putting it back in should get you out of download mode. Have you tried to boot into recovery?. I know you don't want to factory reset but you can check if recovery still there then reboot from recovery.
 
I turned on USB debugging before it got stuck in download mode. And pulling the battery doesn't help, I can still only boot into download mode. It will not boot into recovery mode.
 
I've read over the XDA link a few times and seems that it should work. I'm gonna download the file and try it on my i535 when I get off work today. I have 3 different carrier versions of s3's that I play around with and don't mind experimenting with.
 
It does not work on my phone, it runs but then ends up with an error message "cannot write", which is a permissions problem. The phone was not rooted.
 
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Update: I tried flashing the "No Wipe Factory Image" again using Odin from a different computer with a different USB cord AND IT WORKED. My photos are all there!
 
Great, downloading the zip now and debating on how to brick mine without making it totally unrecoverable. Need a excuse to install i747 motherboard and get away from locked bootloader on i535. Verizon knows how to take all the fun out of good little phone.
 
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