Help Trying to recover stuff off a Galaxy S2 with a broken screen

[Chubbs99]

Hey guys, Kinda hoping someone will have some ideas and I'm not as screwed as I'm starting to thing I am. Well not so much me but my Fiancee lol. The other day she dropped her Galaxy S2 and the screen cracked and is completely black. When you press the home button the soft touch buttons light up, the volume works so I know the phone at least works... for the most part.

We have a replacement we will be using, but It has fallen on me to recover stuff off her phone, namely the images if possible. I've tried connecting it via USB and trying to get Kies to connect, but it won't, it just sits on Loading forever.

I've tried following the guide on How to Geek to remote view the screen. I've set up Android SDK and got to the part where I need to check the connectivity and the adb.exe cmd doesn't recognize the phone is connected.

My phone works when connected by USB so my initial thought is her phone is completely borked and without an expensive repair we aren't getting the data back. I'm hoping that someone has an Idea that may work.

 

[Ijaz Ahmed]

If drivers are installed on the PC, the GT-I9100 should be visible to the computer as media device.

Do you see it in "My Computer" ?


As a test to check if the USB part still works, you can connect it to a PC (which does not have android drivers) and see if PC tells you something detected ?

ADB will only work if the phone had "USB Debugging" enabled.

 

[Chubbs99]

My laptop has the drivers installed, I can plug my Galaxy S2 in and Kies picks it up no problem, and I'll see my phone in My Computer even without enabling usb storage mode. Her's on the other hand I get nothing. Her phone will beep when plugged into the usb, and my laptop makes the usb connected / disconnected beeps as appropriate, but nothing else

USB debugging isn't enabled... so that solves the adb part, But I thought I read in another thread that I could still use a remote screen tool to try and blindly enable it, which was my goal.

As a stroke of good news on the not completely dead side of things, Under Devices and Printers her "SAMSUNG_Android" shows up as a modem, with a yellow triangle and a status of Needs Troubleshooting when plugged in to a usb hub, when I plugged the usb directly into the laptop that went away, but the computer still thinks its a modem (Its listed under Unspecified). Kies still can't finish connecting, and still not showing up in My Computer.

 

[NealOglengo]

Hi Chubbs

I have had the exact same problem now for a few weeks, I do not want to hand my phone in to get fixed as I will loose the data on my phone.

USB Debugging mode is not enabled so Ive sort of resigned myself to the fact that I cannot access my data?

Has anyone out there got any solutions?

Neal

 

[stangirl]

So I broke my screen and have been searching forums for a solution to get the photos off my phone. Of course there are no clear cut, easy solutions but this is how I got it to work.

First off, my phone did have the kies air app on it. I think I tried to use it once a long time ago without success, but other than that had never touch the app on my phone.

I downloaded kies air to my pc running windows xp. I ran the normal install without any extras &/or updates and started the program.

Next I plugged my phone into the usb. Keep in mind, I knew my phone was on because I could hear the android start-up sound and the lower button lights were visible. Nothing else on my phone was visible.

Once the usb was plugged into the phone, the 'CONNECTING' notification in the kies air program was doing it's thing, however it got stuck on the 'connecting' loop for some time.

This next part is where it takes patience & quite a bit of experimentation!!

While the computer and phone were attempting to connect, I would try to hit my phone's screen in strategic locations knowing that somewhere on the phone was a message to "connect usb to pc" (or some message like that). I had to try several times, firts; touching the power button and swiping the screen to verify my phone was out of sleep mode, second; touching different areas on my screen until something happened to make the connection work on my pc.

If finally worked. I had gotten my phone out of sleep and then hit -just above center- on my phone. Success, the pc found the phone and I was able to copy my pictures using the standard windows interface.

Trial and error is the key, don't give up!!