Situation
I have an old phone, it's been replaced, but it still has some photos on I want to recover. From the symptoms I presume it must be a hardware fault, and I am wondering what options are available to me.
I have a friend who works as an embedded engineer who is willing to help me try get the photos off of it. The current possibilities they could think of are:
- Buy a cheap new screen to connect to the phone to see if we can get the UI back
- Attempt to connect via the JTAG pins and execute a script to extract the data
Are there other options? Or should we go with one of these?
More information
If it's relevant, the phone is a Pixel XL. A possible silver lining is I was running LineageOS, so I unlocked the bootloader and was never able to re-lock it.
The symptoms at the time of death were:
- Phone would randomly restart every few weeks
- This got more and more frequent
- One day the phone restarted and never turned back on
- If I held the power button to turn it back on, the phone vibrated yet the screen never turned on
- When plugged in the red light didn't appear even though it was drawing Watts
- Forced resets (holding power and volume down button for 30+ seconds) sometimes caused a vibration but nothing ever appeared
- Plugging it into a laptop resulted in no devices being visible to the laptop (presumably I needed to enable file transfer via the UI which wasn't possible)
It's since sat in a box for 2 years and now there is no vibration whatsoever, but it does still draw current when charging. (I contacted multiple places about data recovery in the last couple of years but never received a response.)
