[Q] Boot Failure

Hi All,

I want to start by apologising because I am aware there are a lot of these threads in this section, however I have trawled a lot of them and tried a couple of the suggestions given in them as they tend to point to the same solutions. Though the solutions I have tried have failed to work.

So the back story, my Aunt has a Samsung Galaxy S3 I9300. As far as I can tell and from information given to me it is a UK model which is operator free and it was being used on the Vodafone network. Unfortunately, I have no idea what version of Android was running on it.

She had it in her bag/pocket one day, went to use it and found that it was stuck on the purple Samsung screen it then continued to reboot round and round until the battery died. She has a lot of photos of her 1 year old daughter on it that haven't been backed up, so it is important that I do my all to get these back.

I first booted into the standard recovery software (Volume + Up + Power), told me it failed to mount E:, /efs and /data. I then tried to use TWRP by flashing the software to the device using Odin v1.85 and the download mode (Volume + Down + Power). This too failed to load the /data partition which is were I believe from my research the photos are stored.

I then tried flashing a stock firmware + recovery to the device from SamMobile and now I can only boot as far as the black Samsung Galaxy screen and the recovery is back to standard and giving the same errors as before.

Is there ANY way I can get that /data parition to mount on anything without losing the data?

I have read that it may be possible to do a kies update and then use recovery software to pull a binary code on the partition and then standard recovery software to get the data back. However, I would like to avoid this as it is basically deleting the data on the basis I might manage a miracle.

Any help will be MAJORLY appreciated.

Thank you for the quick replies guys.

I am aware it is covered before but I have been through those guides, i.e. Installing a custom recovery and flashing a new ROM, but these methods haven't worked.

I can't mount the /data partition in order to use adb to pull it, also adb won't even start in TWRP.

Is there anyway, using Windows or Linux to mount the eMMC inside the phone via USB to the laptop? Or, does the phone have to recognise the internal memory chip before it will let you do that?