Recover data from broken Samsung phone

Question

I've got an old Android phone with broken display and I'd like to get the data (in particular photos) out of it.

I connected it to my computer but it did not mount automatically and mount says that "no medium found". With dmesg and lsusb I see that it is connected. Could anyone help me to mount it and get access the data?

$ dmesg

usb 1-1.2: new high-speed USB device number 12 using ehci-pci
usb-storage 1-1.2:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
scsi host6: usb-storage 1-1.2:1.0
scsi 6:0:0:0: Direct-Access Android UMS Composite 0001 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
scsi 6:0:0:1: Direct-Access Android UMS Composite 0001 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk
sd 6:0:0:1: [sdc] Attached SCSI removable disk

$ lsusb

Bus 001 Device 012: ID 04e8:681d Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd Galaxy Portal/Spica Android Phone

$ sudo mount /dev/sdb /mnt/pphone/

mount: /mnt/pphone: no medium found on /dev/sdb.

$ sudo lsblk -alp

/dev/sda    8:0    0 465,8G  0 disk
/dev/sda1   8:1    0   3,7G  0 part [SWAP]
/dev/sda2   8:2    0 275,8G  0 part
/dev/sda3   8:3    0   200M  0 part /boot/efi
/dev/sda4   8:4    0 186,1G  0 part /
/dev/sdb    8:16   1         0 disk
/dev/sdc    8:32   1         0 disk

Please post the output of `sudo lsblk`. You need to mount a filesystem not an entire block device. — 111---, Mar 26 '18 at 12:05
Thanks for your comment, @datUser. I've added the output of lsblk — dpelisek, Mar 27 '18 at 06:39

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 27 '18 at 14:56

Looks like Android devices are not mountable like a mass storage device anymore, they have moved to the media transfer protocol (mtp) [Insert obligatory XKCD Commentary].

Take heart, there's a package mtp-tools that should help access the device over mtp. You can find it for Debian and I assume most other distros.

Here is a list of devices that should work with the protocol as implemented in the mpt-tools package.

Here is a nice set of instructions for how to fly it. If you run into problems, feel free to ask another question or edit the current one. Best of luck.

Recover data from broken Samsung phone

1 Answers1