Recover Video from Lumia 520

[dmarkey]

Hi All,

I have a friend that needs to recover an accidentally deleted video file on their Lumia 520 (w8)

It was on internal storage. Is there any hope I could get raw access to internal storage using Thor2 etc?

Thanks

 

[GoodDayToDie]

Short answer: Nope.
Longer answer: Probably technically possible if you disassemble the phone and use the right hardware to access the NAND directly. Might be possible if you have root (real root, not just interop unlock and full file system access via MTP and so on) and the phone hasn't been used *at all*, but by now parts of the file have almost certainly been overwritten by the Flash controller's wear leveling and such; the whole file's storage will have been TRIMmed.

 

[dmarkey]

Short answer: Nope.
Longer answer: Probably technically possible if you disassemble the phone and use the right hardware to access the NAND directly. Might be possible if you have root (real root, not just interop unlock and full file system access via MTP and so on) and the phone hasn't been used *at all*, but by now parts of the file have almost certainly been overwritten by the Flash controller's wear leveling and such; the whole file's storage will have been TRIMmed.

I heard somewhere that it might be possible to get the phone is mass storage mode which might yield success. I guess it's not actually possible?

 

[GoodDayToDie]

For Lumia phones, the only way I know of to do that requires a development device (i.e. non-retail one, used for internal development and testing of firmware and whatnot). Retail devices are locked out of UMS mode at a very low level.

Even then, there'd be no guarantee. Flash memory overwrites itself all the time, all over the place. The logical disk sectors exposed to the operating system bear no resemblance to the physical memory blocks of NAND flash, which are constantly shuffled for the sake of wear leveling. Otherwise, a frequently-modified location - like a log file or constantly-updated registry key - would burn out the storage where it was located and the whole thing would stop working correctly. On OSes with TRIM support - which Windows has had since Win7, so it's almost certainly in WP8.x - any deleted files are fair game to be re-used for wear leveling and any *large* file is almost certainly at least partially overwritten already. It's not like magnetic storage, where you're fine as long as no new files (or file fragments) have been created; any write anywhere on the file system could destroy the data from a deleted file.