question on galaxy s7 - help me

[oldmanbal]

So I'm building a website for a building company, and need some pictures off the samsung galaxy s7 that the owner gave me. The issue is the phone is dead. The actual device looks brand new, with no scratches or water damage, and has been in a sealed hard case for it's life. Owner said it just stopped powering up one day, and all the cords, and hours of charging in the world don't make a difference. So I narrowed it down to either a dead battery or something truly nefarious.

When I plug it in, it doesn't take a charge, or show that the battery is feeding any power to the device.

Fast forward to yesterday - I swapped out the battery and the following happened:

1. phone turned on and made it to the first verizon splash screen logo after the samsung splash screen - then froze mid animation
2. I held the reset and did a normal boot - the phone made it to the samsung logo and hung.
3. subsequent resets only made it to the first samsung logo and hung.
4. after about an hour the phone stopped powering on, and went back to being a dead paperweight with no response from any of the advanced controls.

I just want to get the photos off of it, but if I could salvage it on the side, I was going to give it to a friends son as a gift, since his cell phones screen is smashed. If I can't revive It I'll feed it into an android data scrape app and see what I can pull off it.

So anyone have guesses as to what the real culprit is on the phone? I can take pictures of the inside circuits if anyone thinks they can diagnose it further from there.

Cheers

 

[T4rd]

Definitely an odd issue.

But does it still not take a charge or indicate charging with the new battery installed? It sounds like the battery isn't getting charged and you killed the new battery trying to get it to boot, so you need to figure out how to charge the battery first before you can continue troubleshooting the phone.

If you can get it to boot, try to boot it into recovery mode at least to see if it will at least do that. From there you can reset the phone, but that will wipe the pics and everything else off of it too. If the phone isn't encrypted (which I think from the S6 or S7 and up it would be encrypted) then you may have file system access while in recovery, but I doubt it. I just know you would with custom recoveries like TWRP, but probably not the stock recovery regardless.

 

[Kardonxt]

You are probably out of luck If the phone was locking up even when you did get it to boot. The s7 is encrypted by default so the eMMC chip can't just be pulled and read on another machine. (Unlikely, but make sure the owner did not install a microsd card and save the pictures to that before you dig too deep.)

This site actually has a pretty good explanation of what needs to happen if you scroll past their sales fluff, down to the s7\s8 section. https://www.gillware.com/phone-data-recovery-services/samsung-data-recovery/
It's important to note that the owner needs to remember the unlock code as well, The service does not include cracking the encryption.

 

[Vengance_01]

This is a long shot but put it on a wireless charging stand and plug it in at the same time overnight