[Q] Galaxy Nexus stopped working, trying to recover important data...

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backupnoob

New member
Sep 5, 2015
3
1
Hi Guys

I'm new to the Forum and start with asking a question - apologize for that, I know that it's impolite.
I'm pretty desperate at the moment. Tried to switch on my Galaxy Nexus some days ago and it did not start. If I try to switch it on (long button press), the google logo appears for about 72 seconds, then "something" happens on the screen (usually the logo becomes brighter and horizontal lines appear on the screen). And that's it.
There's no clear reason why the mobile is broken now.

The big problem is that I have lots of pictures of my little boy on that device, from his birth until now (it's his first birthday tomorrow). These pics are very very important to me, the only pictures I have from his birth. I did not backup those pictures - I'm stupid. So my goal is to rescue those images from the device somehow. Currently I'm spending every free second to read and learn how to recover those images...

Device info:
  • Galaxy Nexus, Tuna Maguro 16GB
  • HW Version: 9
  • Bootloader Version: PRIMEMD04
  • Baseband Version: I9250XXLJ1
  • Everything is stock version, Android 4.4.2 (I think), stock bootloader

What I've tried so far:
- Installed fastload / ADB on Ubuntu 14.04 from repo. Manually installed ADB 1.0.32 as well.
- I can boot the device into Fastboot / Rescue / Odin mode, that works.
- Tried to clear the cache. It hangs after "Formatting /cache". No "completed" message. If I go to the recovery menu now, I get a couple of messages which say
"E:failed to mount /cache (Invalid argument)"
and then lots of "Can't mount /cache/recovery/log" messages.

If I boot in Rescue Mode, select "apply update from ADB" and connect the mobile to the PC:
Code:
[  502.524071] usb 1-5: new high-speed USB device number 3 using ehci-pci
[  502.657321] usb 1-5: New USB device found, idVendor=18d1, idProduct=d001
[  502.657330] usb 1-5: New USB device strings: Mfr=2, Product=3, SerialNumber=4
[  502.657348] usb 1-5: Product: Galaxy Nexus
[  502.657352] usb 1-5: Manufacturer: samsung
[  502.657355] usb 1-5: SerialNumber: (redacted)

So it gets detected, at least.
Then:

Code:
$ ./adb get-state
sideload
$ ./adb devices -l
List of devices attached 
(serial redacted)       sideload usb:1-5
$ ./adb backup -all
adb: unable to connect for backup
$ ./adb bugreport
error: closed
$ ./adb shell pwd
error: closed
$ ./adb logcat
- waiting for device -
^C

I've downloaded the stock yakju ROM from the google dev website (can't post links, sorry).

There are a bunch of files in that archive:
Code:
$ ll
total 298996
drwxr-x--- 2 m m      4096 Aug 21  2013 ./
drwxr-xr-x 7 m m      4096 Aug 30 23:50 ../
-rw-r----- 1 m m   2363392 Aug 21  2013 bootloader-maguro-primemd04.img
-rw-r----- 1 m m       956 Aug 21  2013 flash-all.bat
-rwxr-x--x 1 m m       827 Aug 21  2013 flash-all.sh*
-rwxr-x--x 1 m m       785 Aug 21  2013 flash-base.sh*
-rw-r----- 1 m m 291192953 Aug 21  2013 image-yakju-jwr66y.zip
-rw-r----- 1 m m  12583168 Aug 21  2013 radio-maguro-i9250xxlj1.img

Code:
$ zipinfo image-yakju-jwr66y.zip 
Archive:  image-yakju-jwr66y.zip
Zip file size: 291192953 bytes, number of entries: 5
?rw-r--r--  2.0 unx  4481024 b- defN 09-Jan-01 00:00 boot.img
?rw-r--r--  2.0 unx  5042176 b- defN 09-Jan-01 00:00 recovery.img
?rw-r--r--  2.0 unx 485561008 b- defN 09-Jan-01 00:00 system.img
-rw-------  2.0 unx 140860420 b- defN 13-Aug-13 22:56 userdata.img
-rw-r-----  2.0 unx       93 b- defN 13-Aug-13 16:00 android-info.txt

So my questions are:
Am I doing the right thing here? I Hope that this is a software problem and the hardware is ok.
If yes, which of those file(s) should I flash to the device, without risking the loss of data?
Can you think of any other possibility to recover the data? Clockwork mod or TWRP maybe? Or a custom sideload script (inside the uploaded zip file).
I've read that flashing a custom bootloader wipes the device - so maybe CW / TWRP is not a good idea...

Thank you very very much for your help.
Matt
 

playitlouder

Senior Member
May 1, 2011
419
129
It may have been a while, bit it might help anyways ;)

Boot your phone to the Bootloader mode. Connect it to your PC via USB.
Use Terminal to cd into your adb/fastboot folder.
Grab the latest TWRP from here: https://dl.twrp.me/maguro/
Copy it into the same directory as fastboot and rename it to recovery.img
Then try to boot into recovery (assuming you haven't rooted your phone and you have a locked bootloader) with "./fastboot boot recovery recovery.img"
I am not sure if this will work with a locked bootloader, but it's worth a try.

If it boots to TWRP then "./adb pull /sdcard/ /backup/" this should create a folder with all the contents of the internal memory in the fastboot direcory. Just let it copy, its done when you are at a prompt again.