Help Recover phone from factory reset

[shaomee]

I have a Galaxy Note II and I had installed lots of apps, and had lots of things customised (no flash/custom ROM though).

The battery was at 10% when I went to bed (I had turned off WiFi, GPS, bluetooth, etc.) I thought that would last me. But when I woke up it was already off and I tried turning it on - the battery was at 3% and the phone turned off again and I tried turning it on.

After that, I plugged in another fully charged battery, and I was booted into the factory reset Samsung Android. Every old setting deleted, all the apps. I opened the file explorer, and every file on the internal storage seemed to be gone too.


What would I have to do to get it back again?

Thanks a lot.
shaomee

 

[Hadron]

Stuff that was synced with Google you can just resync back after logging onto your Google account .

Stuff that was backed up elsewhere you restore from a backup.

The rest? If it really was a reset you are probably out of luck. Stuff on SD is easy to recover using a card reader and recovery software on a computer. Internal storage is a different matter, unless your Note II still supports USB Mass Storage rather than MTP (if it does, connect to a computer and run the same data recovery software). Even if it does, you won't have access to the area where apps and app data are stored, so I doubt there is anything you can do about that.

However, before worrying about any of that, the first thing is to determine whether it really was a factory reset. Did you have to log in to your Google account again, for example? If not then it may be in safe mode rather than having been reset. Safe mode disables all of your additions, but they haven't been deleted, so if that is the case and you could work out why it was in safe mode and get it out of that mode you'd be OK. You could simply try rebooting - check the volume down key is working and isn't stuck first, as booting while pressing that is I think how you enter safe mode on a Note II (different from my phone).

 

[shaomee]

Hey, thanks for the response.

Yeah, I had a similar problem on my other phone once and simply rebooting fixed it. No such luck here. I opened the Google apps, and I am definitely not signed in. I checked the storage settings, and it does show only like 2GB free (just as it was before).

Stuff that was synced with Google you can just resync back after logging onto your Google account .

Stuff that was backed up elsewhere you restore from a backup.

The rest? If it really was a reset you are probably out of luck. Stuff on SD is easy to recover using a card reader and recovery software on a computer. Internal storage is a different matter, unless your Note II still supports USB Mass Storage rather than MTP (if it does, connect to a computer and run the same data recovery software). Even if it does, you won't have access to the area where apps and app data are stored, so I doubt there is anything you can do about that.

However, before worrying about any of that, the first thing is to determine whether it really was a factory reset. Did you have to log in to your Google account again, for example? If not then it may be in safe mode rather than having been reset. Safe mode disables all of your additions, but they haven't been deleted, so if that is the case and you could work out why it was in safe mode and get it out of that mode you'd be OK. You could simply try rebooting - check the volume down key is working and isn't stuck first, as booting while pressing that is I think how you enter safe mode on a Note II (different from my phone).