Data Recovery after Bootloop? Please advise. - General Questions and Answers

So day before yesterday my dads phone asus zenfone 2 (Z00AD) went into bootloop. it kept booting repeatedly never making it to the home screen. anyway, he took it to asus repair and we got the phone back today. its back to normal but all data is lost. (We had not backed up anything) I downloaded a few android data recovery softwares like mobikin and dr fone but they require the android to be rooted to scan for lost data.
Now my question is, do you think its possible to recover data once the phone has been flashed? I am apprehensive to do the rooting and will only go ahead with it if there is a real chance some lost data may be recovered through such android data recovery softwares.
Please advise. Should I go ahead and root and give it a try?
thank you so much in advance.

You should have backed up before taking it the center(you could have flashed a custom recovery and enable mtp mode and backed up to pc).after a stock ROM is flashed chances of recovery is almost nill.

Just one question, why did you take it down to the shop? It is easy as hell to fix a bricked device. I remember taking down my device to the shop twice and got a new one twice but I managed now to fix it. You will most likely have gotten a replacement for your device. Also, if there is root availible for your device, there are stock rom images to flash via fastboot.

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[Q] Hard-Brick I535 After Restoring from Nandroid Backup?

I've looked around quite a bit, but can't find anyone who has had this problem when restoring. I was trying out Paranoid Android 3.10 D2VZW on my Galaxy SIII, and decided to go back to JellyBam 8.2.0 D2VZW. Both are 4.2.2 ROMs. I rebooted into CWM Recovery, wiped data and cache (can't remember if I wiped the Dalvik), and restored my JellyBam backup. The restore went fine, and I rebooted the system from CWM...nothing! Phone is completely black, no boot up at all. I tried the power button, a battery pull, booting into recovery, and booting into download. When I plug my phone into my computer (a Mac with Windows running in Parallels), I get QHSUSB_DLOAD. So far my research tells me this means my phone is hard-bricked. If I plug in without a battery, I get a red LED light that extinguishes after a few minutes. My understanding of hard-bricking is that it's caused by flashing ROMs not intended for my phone (i.e. an international version ROM). Why would my phone hard-brick if the last thing I did is restore a backup from a previously-working ROM built for my phone? I didn't check the md5, but if the md5 failed wouldn't the restore fail too? I literally can't do anything with my phone. No display, no Odin/download, no recovery. The only indications that it isn't completely fried are the red LED and my computer recognizing the QHSUSB_DLOAD and making a notification sound when it's connected or disconnected. I have no problem sending it to be JTAGed if need be, but I'm not 100% that it's hard-bricked. Any suggestions?
ransdell2 said:
I've looked around quite a bit, but can't find anyone who has had this problem when restoring. I was trying out Paranoid Android 3.10 D2VZW on my Galaxy SIII, and decided to go back to JellyBam 8.2.0 D2VZW. Both are 4.2.2 ROMs. I rebooted into CWM Recovery, wiped data and cache (can't remember if I wiped the Dalvik), and restored my JellyBam backup. The restore went fine, and I rebooted the system from CWM...nothing! Phone is completely black, no boot up at all. I tried the power button, a battery pull, booting into recovery, and booting into download. When I plug my phone into my computer (a Mac with Windows running in Parallels), I get QHSUSB_DLOAD. So far my research tells me this means my phone is hard-bricked. If I plug in without a battery, I get a red LED light that extinguishes after a few minutes. My understanding of hard-bricking is that it's caused by flashing ROMs not intended for my phone (i.e. an international version ROM). Why would my phone hard-brick if the last thing I did is restore a backup from a previously-working ROM built for my phone? I didn't check the md5, but if the md5 failed wouldn't the restore fail too? I literally can't do anything with my phone. No display, no Odin/download, no recovery. The only indications that it isn't completely fried are the red LED and my computer recognizing the QHSUSB_DLOAD and making a notification sound when it's connected or disconnected. I have no problem sending it to be JTAGed if need be, but I'm not 100% that it's hard-bricked. Any suggestions?
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Click to collapse
It's definitely hard bricked, whatever happened is very strange though, as a nandroid doesn't usually mess up your boot partition.
Flashing a rom not intended for your phone can cause a hard brick, but that's not the only way it can happen. Somewhere in the restore process your boot partition got corrupted. Your base coding somehow is not being recognized, and your computer and phone can't tell what's supposed to run. A jtag is really your only option.
TWRP offers you the option to disable the boot and recovery partition when restoring. After you fix your phone, I'd recommend trying that out so you're absolutely sure your boot partition doesn't get touched. Those really don't need to be restored anyway.
Sorry that happened to you.
Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk 2
Bummer. Thanks for the input. I kinda figured that was the case, but was hoping I was missing something. Guess I'm going to have it JTAGed, probably by Mobile Tech Videos. The process looks fairly simple. If the equipment costs were comparable to having someone else do it I might do it myself, but if that were the case everyone else would be doing that too! I'll let you know how it goes.
ransdell2 said:
Bummer. Thanks for the input. I kinda figured that was the case, but was hoping I was missing something. Guess I'm going to have it JTAGed, probably by Mobile Tech Videos. The process looks fairly simple. If the equipment costs were comparable to having someone else do it I might do it myself, but if that were the case everyone else would be doing that too! I'll let you know how it goes.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I think the price is reasonable if you factor in equipment and labor.
Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk 2
BadUsername said:
I think the price is reasonable if you factor in equipment and labor.
Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk 2
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Got my phone JTAGed by Patrick Walls (whose service is available on eBay for ~$35), and it works great. Fast service and great communication from Patrick. The phone came back unrooted with a stock 4.1.2 ROM. Of course I immediately re-rooted it and flashed a fresh JellyBAM ROM to it (with a huge feeling of trepidation), and so far everything is working, with the exception of the camera (I get "Can't connect to camera" after taking one picture, and a reboot is the only thing that enables the camera again, for one pictures, then can't connect, reboot, one pic, can't connect, etc.).
Having never hard-bricked before after many, many ROM changes on a Fascinate and about 10 ROM changes on my S3, I'm a little nervous about changing them now. Is my hesitation unfounded providing I don't mess with the bootchain? To root my phone I flashed the VRALEC bootchain, then TWRP, then rooted, then JellyBAM, then the VRBMD3 bootchain, as per this rooting guide:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2046439
Now that I've put my phone back to the Jelly Bean bootchain, I should be free to flash ROMs built for my device without a serious concern about hard-bricking, right?
ransdell2 said:
Got my phone JTAGed by Patrick Walls (whose service is available on eBay for ~$35), and it works great. Fast service and great communication from Patrick. The phone came back unrooted with a stock 4.1.2 ROM. Of course I immediately re-rooted it and flashed a fresh JellyBAM ROM to it (with a huge feeling of trepidation), and so far everything is working, with the exception of the camera (I get "Can't connect to camera" after taking one picture, and a reboot is the only thing that enables the camera again, for one pictures, then can't connect, reboot, one pic, can't connect, etc.).
Having never hard-bricked before after many, many ROM changes on a Fascinate and about 10 ROM changes on my S3, I'm a little nervous about changing them now. Is my hesitation unfounded providing I don't mess with the bootchain? To root my phone I flashed the VRALEC bootchain, then TWRP, then rooted, then JellyBAM, then the VRBMD3 bootchain, as per this rooting guide:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2046439
Now that I've put my phone back to the Jelly Bean bootchain, I should be free to flash ROMs built for my device without a serious concern about hard-bricking, right?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Glad you got it working.
There's always a risk of something going wrong and a hard brick reoccurring, you just had bad luck. I don't think your brick had anything to do with your bootchain.
I think what probably happened was when you made a nandroid in cwm, the boot partition somehow got corrupted. CWM by default restores your boot, recovery, data, system, and cache partitions. In the advanced restore section, you can restore one at a time but you have no way of simply disabling a particular partition from being restored. I think since the boot partition was messed up, it erased your good data and hard-bricked your phone.
TWRP by default only backs up your data, cache, and system partitions and leaves your boot and recovery partitions alone. If you restore that backup, then there's pretty much no way a hard brick can happen. I can't think of any reason why you really need to backup your recovery or boot partition.
Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk 2
BadUsername said:
Glad you got it working.
There's always a risk of something going wrong and a hard brick reoccurring, you just had bad luck. I don't think your brick had anything to do with your bootchain.
I think what probably happened was when you made a nandroid in cwm, the boot partition somehow got corrupted. CWM by default restores your boot, recovery, data, system, and cache partitions. In the advanced restore section, you can restore one at a time but you have no way of simply disabling a particular partition from being restored. I think since the boot partition was messed up, it erased your good data and hard-bricked your phone.
TWRP by default only backs up your data, cache, and system partitions and leaves your boot and recovery partitions alone. If you restore that backup, then there's pretty much no way a hard brick can happen. I can't think of any reason why you really need to backup your recovery or boot partition.
Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk 2
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Great, thanks for the info! I'll make sure that the boot and recovery partitions aren't touched in the future. I've primarily used CWM, but am probably just going to stick with TWRP.

Experienced User seeking help on a Semi Bricked N5

Hey guys. Before I get to my issue and seek your help , please allow me to give you a bit of background about my self wrt Android OS and nexus devices. I have been a Nexus device user since the N1 days. OS flashing , Custom rom's , kernel patching , etc are nothing new to me. I can safely say that I am a custom rom addict , hence I know the mods for my devices intricately well. With this out of the way , I'd like to share the sequence of events that took place yesterday , which lead to this new thread , wherein I desperately need some expert advice.
- I was running the latest Bigxie 5.0 rom for my 32gb N5. It had root and TWRP and elementalx kernel
- I wanted to upgrade to the 5.0.1 without losing any data , so I first tried to sideload the OTA zip file , which failed with some error. I then followed this guide (http://bit.ly/1wNT36l) . I was able to therefore flash the 5.0.1 without losing data. I re rooted my phone , re flashed the recovery and the kernel
- At the same time I was upgrading my LG g3 to Lollipop. I wanted to try the "Tap & Go" data transfer feature , so I used that process to transfer the data from my current N5 to the new G3. Here is when the issue started. The data transfer didn't go through , as only the email accounts transferred to the G3. At the same time , I got this notification on the Nexus that Tap and Go was used to transfer my email accounts , and this notification couldn't be cleared from the notification panel. For some odd reason , I decided to jump back into recovery and wipe cache and dalvik cache to get rid of this notification
- As soon as I did that specific wipe and restarted the phone , the phone would just loop at the nexus image boot screen. 15 minutes later I went back into recovery and decided to use the "factory reset wipe". That too didn't solve my problem. Frustrated at the turn of events , I reflashed Bigxie's 5.0 rom from my internal storage , via twrp.
- The phone finally booted! But now the problem was that my Sdcard was showing no files. It was all blank. I checked with root explorer / es explorer and even when I hooked up my phone to my pc , the sdcard was showing no files. I could , however , see all my files in the root -- data -- media -- 0 folder. I tried my best to extract all my files from there , but each time I got an error that pretty much meant that no files could be moved from there. Interestingly , when I went into twrp , and went into file manager in the advanced options , it showed all my files on the sdcard as though nothing went wrong. So I could see everything on the sdcard in recovery , but nothing if i booted into the OS.
- Since I had made a backup of most of my data prior to any this happening , with the exception of certain whatsapp data , and after having spent almost 5-6 hours in figuring out where I had possibly gone wrong , I decided to wipe my device clean and just install the stock OS and pack this device away for good
- I downloaded the stock factory image for 5.0 from the official site and went back into bootloader and fastboot flashed each and every file. The phone booted , BUT , now my phone showed only 12GB as the size of the storage with 11GB available. This frazzled me beyond words! How did I reach this stage wherein my internal storage was screwed to this level?
- I again went back into bootloader , flashed 5.0.1 , wiped the device and now the phone is again stuck in a bootloop on the nexus bootscreen
I have finally decided to send the device to the LG service center near my office , but I wanted to share this experience with the community hear and seek their guidance on where I possibly went wrong and what I can do now to put things back together to some degree of normality. Have I somehow damaged something at the hardware level that a change of motherboard may be warranted or is this a pure software screwup?
Thank you for your patience in reading this loooooong story , but I had to explain each and every step in perfect detail.
after flashing stock image.. there is no need to wipe anything... just boot it... takes around 5-10mins max but comes up.....
When it does 12GB on a 32GB device, you just have to factory reset using the option from inside the ROM.
Sent from my Nexus 5 with the N5X LRX22C ROM
tip, just because you know and read rom´s instructions and such, dosent mean you are an experiencied user.this 99% would have save you
http://forum.xda-developers.com/goo...orial-how-to-flash-factory-images-lg-t2713833
opssemnik said:
tip, just because you know and read rom´s instructions and such, dosent mean you are an experiencied user.this 99% would have save you
http://forum.xda-developers.com/goo...orial-how-to-flash-factory-images-lg-t2713833
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well said , and understood. I followed a different set of instructions and flashed back to stock and fixed my device. Thank you for your help.
ecksreturns said:
Well said , and understood. I followed a different set of instructions and flashed back to stock and fixed my device. Thank you for your help.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
haha no problem, i thoguth i was an experienced user too, but then i bricked mine by flashing lg g2´s rpm partition to get a different partition layout. lol. glad you got your n5 back

I think I've bricked my phone and am not sure what to do

Hey all, before I start I'd like to apologise for making the post here but I don't know what you guys would classify the state of my phone as, "bricked, soft-bricked, hard-bricked", I have no clue! As a result I have no idea what threads to start looking in so I've come here to make this, sorry again!
I'm here looking for help because I think I've completely destroyed my Moto G and really really would like to fix it.
Basically, I had been running an old version of CyanogenMod for months and was not able to update due to the fact my bootloader was not updated. After finally updating it through a tool on XDA, I installed the newest version of CyanogenMod onto the phone and it was all going well, except for the fact all of my Google apps were crashing and making it impossible to use.
Now, I'm not sure why, but without taking any precautionary measures or looking into it at all or what I needed to do, I then decided to try and flash a Paranoid Android rom onto the phone, which installed fine. I load the phone up and something comes up with a passcode saying I need to unlock it to use the phone. I put in some random things and eventually get it, but it says my data is corrupted and therefore I need to reset to factory settings and there's a button there to do it. I think "why not" and click.
So now, the phone did something weird and basically went into a bootloop of the PA logo, so I restarted the phone and went to the bootloader thing. When doing "Normal Startup" it loads the phone with the PA logo like before, comes up with a brief "Android is Upgrading" screen before showing me the passcode screen for half a second, before repeating this, thus having a bootloop. Every so often, I can put my code in and press the reset button again, but it does the same thing.
On the other hand, if I try to access my ClockworkMod recovery system, the screen repeatedly flashes with the CWM background of the Android Alien guy, as if to say it keeps trying to start but it cannot.
TLDR: I cannot access my phone through a normal powerup or through my recovery, have I screwed it completely?
I'd hugely appreciate any help here guys because I'm stressing like I never have before here, thanks!
EDIT: it is the X0123 version!
Spaciouz said:
TLDR: I cannot access my phone through a normal powerup or through my recovery, have I screwed it completely?
I'd hugely appreciate any help here guys because I'm stressing like I never have before here, thanks!
EDIT: it is the X0123 version!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Just a few questions before I start suggesting a full flash to stock.
Did you have any SIM passwords, boot passwords, CWM passwords before flashing?
Also In CWM does it flash before any options are selected and did you dirty flash the new ROM over the old ROM?
Anyway, your phone is not hardbricked as it can get to recovery so thats good news.
I would suggest flashing your phone back to factory stock using the tools here on XDA (http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2542219). That should hopefully resolve most of the issues and then if you feel like it you can start flashing custom ROMs again.

OTA update Fail, Save my data

Hi ~
- Be kind with me, it's my first post! -
I'm facing a very bad problem with my Galaxy S6. A week ago I received an OTA from Samsung and I installed it. My phone rebooted and showed the bugdroid, meaning that the update was progressing. After that, the device keep rebooting over and over just after I entered my encryption password. I said to myself that I can try to wipe the cache because maybe an application was causing this problem. But now, the device is only showing the Samsung logo then just shut himself off.
Now I need your help to get my data. The hard part is that my device is encrypted. After many hour of search I see two solutions:
Flash the rom via ODIN
Install TWRP which can read encrypted volumes
The first solution seems easy and I keep the warranty. The problem is that I'm not 100% sure that flashing the rom again will not touch the /data and /sdext partitions (and the header/footer where master key are to decrypt the volume).
The second solution seems safer and should not touch any other partitions. But knox counter will be incremented and I will loose my warranty.
So, does anyone could test if flashing the rom via ODIN do not absolutely touch encrypted volumes and certificate that I will be able to get my data again?
Thank you a lot
Have a leap of faith. Go ahead and flash. Otherwise bring it to Samsung for warranty repair. They may be able to recover your data for you.
roydok said:
Have a leap of faith. Go ahead and flash. Otherwise bring it to Samsung for warranty repair. They may be able to recover your data for you.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I want to be sure and I don't want to loose any photos if possible, so no
I already tried to go in a Samsung repair store (Allo PSM), but they just don't care about my data, their job is just to make the phone working again.
So Anyone is able to confirm to me that flashing stock Galaxy S6 ROM (AP Via Odin) doesn't touch the /data and /sdext partition that are encrypted?
After many hours of search, I was able to make my phone working again!
For anyone concerned by the problem in the future, here's some informations:
You can flash a stock rom, your encrypted /data will not be erased and you will be prompt to enter your password on the next boot
In my case flashing a newer rom didn't solve my problem (bootloop after entering the password of the encrypted partition). I had to flash the rom that was in the phone before the OTA.
Now everything seems to working again. No data were lost, all my configuration was saved. Android showed a message that a problem occurred during the upgrade process and I sent logs to Samsung, hoping that it will help them!

Data recovery after clean install / format phone?

Hey all,
I've got a question. Most likely a question I know the answer to and I'm in denial. My phone crashed on vacation and wouldn't boot anymore. Not sure how it append but it did. A software failure. After many attempts I've tried to recover some of my vacation photo's an video's. (luckily I've added a cloud sync before going on vacation in case of theft and havn't lost all) In the restore attempts I've soft bricked my phone (from bad to worse) And had to make a clean install with odin. I've installed a clean Stock Rom and rooted it with Magisk (supersu resulted in bootloop). I've tried a few recovery programs from the first page googleling. But no results.
I'm pretty sure the previous version was encrypted and I'm hitting a dead end here.
As for my question: Have I've really given myself the answer not getting it back because of the (possible) encryption or are there better recovery options?
As soon as you started writing over everything with a new flash, you effectively became SOL. There's likely nothing left to recover.
Even before that, while recovery might have been possible, you wouldn't have liked the price tag.
Yeah, thanks. I've figured that. By now I've accepted the fact that I've lost the content and moved on.

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