Wanted: Android data recovery service.

[randomness]

My phone is still in boot loop. I posted about this problem in passing on August 21. Nothing about the phone has changed.

I still have many images and some text messages I would like to recover from it. I am willing to pay someone to get them back for me.

If you have had good experiences with a service and you would like to recommend them, please let me know.

Comments

[bikergeek]

Dumb question: what make and model phone do you have, and what version of Android (or other custom ROM like LineageOS) is it running? Have you tried searching for info on how to fix the boot loop? How about plugging it into a computer and using adb to reboot it into the bootloader or into recovery mode?

Sorry if a lot of this seems kinda basic, I know you're a very tech-savvy person but don't know the level/depth of your Android knowledge and experience. A lot of programmer and sysadmin types of my acquaintance expect their mobile phones to Just Work and don't mess with them much.

[randomness]

Thanks for your reply! Sorry it's taken a bit to get back to you. I'd call myself a middle-level Android user; I hadn't wanted to root the device though I'd considered it. I didn't care enough to mess with a custom ROM, and while the adoptable storage kludge drove me nuts it didn't frustrate me enough to go and root the phone.

With the caveat that I haven't touched it in a couple of months pending handing it off to a recovery service, here's are some of the details:

My phone, a Moto E 2nd Gen (XT 1521) was running Android 6.0 Marshmallow, received as a standard over-the-air OS upgrade from Motorola. I have done a lot of research, but all my attempts to get it out of boot loop including rebooting it from recovery mode have failed.

For a while I was able to get it into "black screen of death" if I booted it from recovery mode. I was even able, if I moved quickly, to get it from recovery mode to reboot into safe mode. This was vaguely amusing because I then got a black screen with nothing but a "safe mode" indicator in the lower left hand corner. However, that was a temporary situation.

I was never able to get the phone to mount as a volume on any of my computers after it got stuck in a boot loop.

[bikergeek]

Yeah the only thing I'd be able to think of to do is to see if I could use adb to reboot it into recovery mode and get it to stay there, or to reboot into the bootloader. But if it goes straight into the boot loop on power-up, that's not likely.

[rmd]

From a friend of mine on twitter: "Check out XDA-DEVELOPERS. Best source for Android info/support"

http://twitter.com/goldiefish/status/908281668930285568

[randomness]

Thanks for that!

Sadly, what I see are a number of other people in similar situations with the same hardware, but few answers to the problem.

The primary problem is that I don't want to wipe the phone before I try to recover the data. I could wipe the phone and start fresh but I'd rather hand the device to a recovery service before I do so I at least have the photos.