It's my own personal Nokia E70-2 phone and I naively followed some forum instructions to push and hold 3, * & green send key while powering up the phone from an off state to fix a different issue.
My assumption was it would reset it to some factory default settings. Never in my life have I heard of any device that formats and wipes all user data without some type of prompt or warning - especially a business class device.
I purchased a SIM card reader and successfully recovered some data from it but the data I'm looking for appears to have been stored on the internal phone memory and not on the SIM. (addressbook, pictures, videos, calendar, etc)
Nobody could help with
Solutions I've seen so far include
-Chip off method. (I'd prefer not to desolder any chips if possible.)
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-Flash Boxes - may consider this if it can do what I want & the procedure is documented well and price is reasonable
-JTAG (haven't found schematics/docs/procedures for this phone yet & don't want to disassemble phone)
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Any other suggestions/tips to help me with my problem? I've got an official Nokia CA-53 cable for the phone (it works great) and also a cheap China immitation CA-42 Cable that's using Microchip PIC12C508A microcontroller and the Prolific PL2303 USB-to-Serial bridge controller to mimic the original DKU-5 (NOT even close to a CA-42 and could never get it work).
Hi maemofan
Due to your handset being on a Symbian platform it is not supported for recovery of deleted data at the moment on any software tools on the market..
maemofan,
I think unfortunately that you are going to find it very difficult to recover any deleted data from that handset without removing the chip, which a) is fiddly and b) is very costly.
There are rumours of a tool coming to the market which can recover deleted data from a Symbian (the operating system of your handset) mobile telephone however at this time the tool is not available as far as I know. ( Flash boxes would be an ideal solution for a Series 40 Nokia however from a Symbian handset they it is not possible to recover SMS, Calls, contacts or the other data types you have mentioned I don't think. I believe that CelleBrite (UFED & UFED Physical) would only recover deleted data from the Event Log of the handset which stores communication data, e.g. calls, SMS/MMS, GPRS connections etc. though unfortunately not the data types you have suggested you are looking to recover. The Event Log can only store a maximum of 1000 entries total, made up of the different data types and although SMS/MMS can be recovered only a fragment of the message is recoverable. I have not examined a Symbian using MobilEdit however having used it with other handsets I would assume it's functionality is similar to that of CelleBrite's.
It really leaves you with 2 choices. The first one slightly less invasive being, does it JTAG? and the last option being chip off, which likely will render the handset useless afterwards. As yet I have not come across anybody who does 'chip-on' though I assume there must be someone out there who does. The only other problem with either of these as a choice is once you have the raw data recovered by JTAGing or removing the chip you are going to be presented with a huge file of hexadecimal digits which may mean nothing to you. How do you foresee that you will interpret whatever raw data you are able to get? The same is true if you were able to take a read from the handset using a flash box.
Who knows which choice you will make but whichever it is can I suggest that in future before you perform any task on your phone which you have not done before that you back it up before hand. That way you may not end up in this position again.
Regards,
Colin
Thank you for your replies. Yes the phone is series 60 (v3.0) of Symbian OS version 9.1. I was under the assumption that UFED physical could do a physical dump of the memory chip on the phone which would result in an identical byte by byte image file of what's stored in phone memory similar to using dd or gnu ddrescue to image a hard disk. I was also under the assumption there exists a flash box device out there that's capable of the same thing. I have no experience with any of the above.
If I'm incorrect in my assumptions about the software options I do have soldering experience and am in the market for a Metcal Soldering & SMT Rework Station with a Talon Handpiece to make my job easier. I'd also be using that for pc and ipod repairs (possibly mobiles) and also use that to desolder and resolder the memory onto the PCB of my phone as a last resort if I find a way to access JTAG.
I have an intermediate understanding of file systems and have done logical recoveries of many hard disks. I understand symbian uses a FAT filesystem but with flash memory there's wear leveling to consider and this may be a learning curve for me vs the way hard disks store data.
Thank you for the suggestion to make a backup of the phone. I'm aware the fault is my own for not having a backup, unfortunately it was a hard lesson learned. I'm still surprised that a simple series of keypresses can wipe user data off the phone without warning. Malicous individuals could exploit that if they get their hands on someones phone for 10-15 seconds.
Anyhow, I'm using my Nokia 6682B backup phone until I can determine if I'll be able to save the data off the E70-2.
What is your definition of very costly?