Database Info

How Long Before Rooting My Moto G LTE?

Hello, all!
I've been an iPod Touch + Nokia flip-phone user for many years, and just last week I finally purchased an unlocked Motorola Moto G LTE (XT1045) to replace them both. So, since I'm new to the Android world, I have come to ask this question:
How long would you recommend I wait before rooting my device? There are some features that would REALLY like (moving entire apps to SD card (I was a bit dismayed to find that when moving all my apps to the SD card, it only saved a very, very small amount of storage space), as well as being able to prioritize memory usage for apps, Titanium backup, underclocking while phone is locked, etc.). I'm viewing this phone more like a very mobile computer than I did my iPod Touch I always carried, and as such I am expecting more of it.
The reason I ask is I am wondering how long it will take for good support to start showing up for custom ROMs and stuff. Since this is my first time rooting a device, I would like there to be a decent amount of documentation, and would also like the majority of the bugs worked out of anything involving rooting for this specific phone.
On a side note, does anyone know of a way to unlock the bootloader without going through Motorola's site? I've read that by going through there to get the unlock code, you are basically registering your phone as "not under warranty." So, if something that is clearly a manufacturing defect (like charging connector becoming loose or something like that) shows up in a month, I'd like to be able to un-root it to send it in.
Thanks in advance!
ElectroPulse

BUMP.
I got to thinking about it, and since I am actually going to be outside of the country for the next 10 months, so my warranty is pretty much useless anyway. Shipping it back would require removing the battery, which in turn would void the warranty.
So, at this point my only question is how long would you recommend to wait to root my phone in order for there to be good documentation, and good support for custom ROMs and stuff?
Thanks!
ElectroPulse

Help an idiot, please

I was not thinking and I sold my phone on Ebay, whats worse is that it was bought by someone out of the country. I didn't think much about the consequences until the nagging question of why someone would buy a phone that will only work on a carrier here in the states, US Cellular. Now I am very concerned. The buyer has already paid for the phone and for shipping. My number one option could be to just cancel the sale and refund the buyers money and eat the shipping. I have began researching how to securely wipe an Android phone and the best answer I have found is to encrypt the phone before I do a factory reset. The problem is that I have already factory reset the phone. In fact, the phone was rooted and rommed and I Oddined the stock recovery back onto the phone. Here are details about the phone. It is a SM-N900R4 US Cellular Samsung Galaxy Note 3. Since I bought the phone new from the carrier I have installed and wiped numerous Roms. I'm not looking for anyone to stick there neck out there and give me guarantees, I just want to know if there is anything I can do to be reasonably sure that the phone is secure. What about apps like IShredder, are they worth the effort. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. thanks

Update, its 5:00am, I encrypted the phone, installed ishredder, ran the app a couple of times. I rerooted the phone using cf autoroot, downloaded a simple data recovery app, and am finding old data Any advice would be appreciated, thanks.

danp12 said:
I was not thinking and I sold my phone on Ebay, whats worse is that it was bought by someone out of the country. I didn't think much about the consequences until the nagging question of why someone would buy a phone that will only work on a carrier here in the states, US Cellular. Now I am very concerned. The buyer has already paid for the phone and for shipping. My number one option could be to just cancel the sale and refund the buyers money and eat the shipping. I have began researching how to securely wipe an Android phone and the best answer I have found is to encrypt the phone before I do a factory reset. The problem is that I have already factory reset the phone. In fact, the phone was rooted and rommed and I Oddined the stock recovery back onto the phone. Here are details about the phone. It is a SM-N900R4 US Cellular Samsung Galaxy Note 3. Since I bought the phone new from the carrier I have installed and wiped numerous Roms. I'm not looking for anyone to stick there neck out there and give me guarantees, I just want to know if there is anything I can do to be reasonably sure that the phone is secure. What about apps like IShredder, are they worth the effort. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. thanks
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I think a factory reset is quite enough, you can wipe the internal storage as well. Just use Odin to flash a stock firmware and recovery and you should be good to go

If you are extra paranoid
Fill the memory with data.
Data and cache partitions are the most important.
Fill it with anything, delete it and fill it again. Seven times.
That will make it as hard as possible to recover any info.
But unless your a giant ass that has annoyed thousands around the world, put all your personal info on your phone. Advertise that fact.
Then be silly enough to advertise to all your enemy's that your selling your phone on eBay...
The standard wipe will likely be enough.

So I made the decision to refund the money and cancel the sale. I am shocked at how easy it is to find pictures, contacts, documents etc. after I encrypted the phone, deleted the data, used iShredder and wrote the drive at least 20 times at 3 cycles per time. I run a simple app called Disk Digger and I can still find data on the phone. Unreal. I think the iShredder app is simply not writing data in all of the areas of the phones memory. In fact, the more times I run iShredder and the more times I run disk digger, the more data I find This phone is connected to so much info like Paypal, Amazon, email, Bank Accounts etc. What a shame, my recommendation for anyone is the first thing you do when you pull your android phone out of the box is to Encrypt the drive, that way down the road when you delete the keys your data is safe. I have unloaded phones in the past but I never really thought much about it until I just really felt like the person buying it was buying it for nefarious purposes.

danp12 said:
So I made the decision to refund the money and cancel the sale. I am shocked at how easy it is to find pictures, contacts, documents etc. after I encrypted the phone, deleted the data, used iShredder and wrote the drive at least 20 times at 3 cycles per time. I run a simple app called Disk Digger and I can still find data on the phone. Unreal. I think the iShredder app is simply not writing data in all of the areas of the phones memory. In fact, the more times I run iShredder and the more times I run disk digger, the more data I find This phone is connected to so much info like Paypal, Amazon, email, Bank Accounts etc. What a shame, my recommendation for anyone is the first thing you do when you pull your android phone out of the box is to Encrypt the drive, that way down the road when you delete the keys your data is safe. I have unloaded phones in the past but I never really thought much about it until I just really felt like the person buying it was buying it for nefarious purposes.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Nothing from apps is stored on the internal sd card.
It's all stored on the data and cache partitions in the internal memory.
Partitions you can't touch without root.
There will always be data of some type left in the memory.
That's just how the memory works.
I have yet to find anything that will wipe the entire device properly automatically..
It has to be done manually.

i9300 repair or retrieving internal storage if phone is not detected from computer?

HI
My wife's phone (i9300 galaxy S3) has gone wrong and it went off without battery.
I found a new battery, but it lasted only one day. I thus decided to take it for repair,
as I think that this is the charge connector that is broken, but actually, the tech told me that it was probably the motherboard,
as when it used a tool to plug it to the direct charge ports on the side, the phone only bootlooped.
Thing is:
My wife's phone wasn't using cloud or external SD,
it was not rooted.
I tried some android toolkits to connect it, but odin or adb don't detect it, so I have no chance to try and put some new kernel on it.
It has no recovery mode, and when in download mode (1st screen), it actually doesn't last long before it reboots anyway.
Choosing some option will also make it reboot.
So I think it is failed beyond software repair.
But if you have suggestion for this (the tech was at a small street stall and I don't expect him to be high level, no offense, but he seemed to only perform two repairs, screen and charge flex boards, so not much more able than me if he can't go beyond this), feel free?
So my second question is :
Does anyone know how to retrieve the internal storage of the phone without breaking it, and reinstall it in a working way on a new motherboard?
Or alternatively, on an emmc reader such as those used for raspberry cards and so on? (I don't want to put some link, I don't want my message to be filtered)
The photos on this chip are priceless for us, and I would even pay professional to retrieve these (I would prefer not having to, because money doesn't exactly come cheap to me, but I guess I won't be able to make it alone.
So if you know some repair service in Europe that would be able to perform such task, I would be grateful for your sharing of such knowledge.
I saw an alternative in malaysia, but it feels a little too far for being able to do something in case of problem.
Thanks for your attention and time.

What to do before turning device over to law enforcement?

A friend's daughter died a couple of years ago. At the time the death was ruled accidental overdose. Long story short, the police and coroner didn't investigate much of anything and what they did, was shoddy. The case was closed and friend was able to take possession of two of her daughters android phones, one was on network, other just used on wifi. Friend does not have any of the passwords and can't get into them.
Since then, new evidence was discovered that shows close to 100% she was murdered. The police however have refused to reopen the case. Friend has tried everything and recently started a Facebook group (#AnswersForMeagan) as a last resort. Group has taken off and much more info discovered. They are getting a lot of attention so today the Sheriff called my friend and they will be meeting soon.
That said, the sheriff didn't know of the two phones. Friend is obviously apprehensive about turning them over, afraid they could botch things up again, or even intentionally mess up the data (there are indeed bad folks corrupted by the money of trafficking and drugs). This is SC. Is anyone aware of a good place that can get into the phones and minimally save off a copy of the data? If you were doing this, what would your process be?
I used to root my android back in the gs3 days. Before that I actually had a palm Pre. I'm IT, I know my way around well, but I haven't fooled with things for several years. Worst case I can help the friend with the right process, but I'd rather a current professional do it.
Strange question and kind of way off topic, but I used to come here all the time and know someone will have advice. If you're interested, come join the group on fb.
Thanks,
Chuck

If on phone MTP mode is enabled and phone supports a USB-C connection then it should be possible to retrieve user-data stored on phone.
MTP functions a lot like USB mass storage. For example, an MTP device shows up in Windows Explorer so you can browse and transfer files.

Samsung S6 (Verizon) reactivation lock help

Hi all-
History of issue - wife & I upgraded phones, but we kept our old Samsung S6 phones for kids to use in school. These are SM-G920V (Verizon phones), but we had switched to T-mobile network. Son's S6 went fritzy - started freezing, randomly reloading, black screen w/flashing blue light until battery ran out, etc. It could boot, but wouldn't stay up. I think some update corrupted memory or something. I tried to factory reset it to get it back to beginning state, but was NOT aware I needed to remove the Samsung account associated with the phone. I'm not even sure I could have, it wouldn't stay up long enough w/o freezing or black screen. Regardless, factory reset didn't work, as when it booted, it eventually had the dead android show up. So I went online, found info about how to flash the phone with the correct Verizon file using Odin to download it, and now it boots android 7.0. However, then I hit the Samsung reactivation lock. It asks for an account/password, which I have, but it won't validate or go to the next step.
I talked to T-mobile tech support, and according to them, it's due to it being originally a Verizon phone on an account that is now deactivated since we switched to T-mobile. They can't do anything, but gave me contacts to 3rd party vendors that could fix/flash it if I could prove I originally bought it. As I used to be w/Verizon, I should be able to find the activation docs of the phone and provide proof, but the "fix" will probably cost upwards of 70+ (maybe closer to $100) for an old S6, which may or may not have as much life left to it. If I'm spending that much $$, I might as well get a cheaper new phone.
However, I'd rather not spend the $$ if I can help it, so am trying to figure out how to fix/flash this and remove the Samsung reactivation lock myself. My understanding is I need some sort of combo file that I can download using Odin, and that there's a process by which you can remove it that way. However, I can't seem to find the combo file for SM-G920V, and am not entirely sure of the steps. I've tried the emergency call method I saw online, but besides having a nice conversation with the 911 folks, I didn't see any of the buttons that the videos specified, maybe because it's android 7.0.
Does anyone have a good tutorial on how to get rid of this, so I can salvage the phone for son's use? I've read some of the XDA forums, but haven't been able to figure out the right steps. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
ET