Hey everyone, I'm an idiot and completely forgot I encrypted the files on my SD Card. I installed a new ROM and now the images I previously had on the memory card are not able to be read by any software and the phone. My guess is, is that the encryption I had prior to flashing the new ROM has encrypted the file to where I can't even view them. Is there anyway to reverse this process? I know it defeats the whole prupose of encryption, but these pictures are important to me since they were pictures of my nephews at my cousin's wedding. I know they wouldn't be the greatest quality images, but I would still love to have them back. Any help on this matter is greatly appreciated
kman79 said:
Hey everyone, I'm an idiot and completely forgot I encrypted the files on my SD Card. I installed a new ROM and now the images I previously had on the memory card are not able to be read by any software and the phone. My guess is, is that the encryption I had prior to flashing the new ROM has encrypted the file to where I can't even view them. Is there anyway to reverse this process? I know it defeats the whole prupose of encryption, but these pictures are important to me since they were pictures of my nephews at my cousin's wedding. I know they wouldn't be the greatest quality images, but I would still love to have them back. Any help on this matter is greatly appreciated
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well, I have a feeling that you are out of luck here. Usually, encryption works with two keys: one at the source and one with the application that did the encryption. These keys are randomly generated. Since you wiped out the original ROM (and the encryption program and (probably) the 2nd key along with it), you are probably screwed. Sorry - wish I had better news. Now, there are special programs and stuff that break cryptography, and I don't know how secure the encryption with WM is, but that is probably not a practical solution. Sorry.
Well, that wasn't what I wanted to hear, but I feel it is the truth and accurate. I appreciate the response and explanation, thanks. Damnit, with my urgency to have the newest ROM, i lost some great pictures of family, oh well.
This is by design. The unique encription key is created during cold boot following a hardreset.
http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonlan/arch...card-wipe-and-encryption-what-s-the-deal.aspx
Ouch!!!!What a bummer
I almost did this with data on a PC which I sold last week. Copied files and tried opening them on my laptop. Luckily I still had the PC to unencrypt my FLICKS...LOL
Oops, that just reminds me I had an encrypted NTFS folder on the PC I upgraded to Vista last week (clean install). Usually never use that thing...
Meh, fortunately it was only an outdated copy of a folder I have on the main PC. But yeah, haven't even checked it, but there won't be any chance there either.
Fortunately I didn't encrypt my SD, as my phone now will just hang upon boot after I installed some program that screws up when loading the Today plugin. Hard reset in the way I guess... is there no safe boot in WM6?
Hi Guys,
I recently bought my Nexus one this past weekend. I'm coming from a Windows Mobile fan(boy) perspective of many years. Not the hugest linux fan, but at least the base level of Android control is a menu and not "dev cmd etc" command line stuff
I like the Nexus one so far. I tried CompanionLink/gSyncit/Nitrodesk Touchdown/Android-sync(Alpha)/Remember The Milk etc, and they all don't sync Outlook very well..so I'm happy to keep my Winmo phone for its use for that, which is excellent and easier to type imho for that kind of stuff within a windows environment. Kind of like a Palm pilot.
As for Apple. I'm proud to say I've never touched one for years, until yesterday. I *had* to get my father a slidey smartphone as a gift, because they're awesome to see and navigate. Since he's not a big data guy I couldn't justify a nexus one, so a used iphone 3G fit the bill.
Hope i don't have to touch it too much tho!
Anyways, I thought I'd give you guys some history on where I'm coming from as an introduction and seeing as I havent posted on here in a few years.
So..regarding my questions:
*Nandroid backups Question
- A nandroid-ext backup will not occur, and will display the ADB Error if you don't actually have an extended partition on your SD Card, correct?
I was trying to do an Nandroid+ext backup, because noobishly i thought it just meant it would backup everything. It didn't work, and neither did the "plug it in the charger tricks" etc, or check if you have enough sd space. So I figured it was because i didnt actually have an extended SD partition. Stock 4gig micro SD btw.
A NAND backup worked after that.
- How do I check if my SD card has an extended partition btw?
*Sdcard/Nandroid folder Question
Are nandroid backups saved here in a chronological order?
Meaning
/first directory asfldkjsdafjs/
/second directory aslkdfjljds/
First is my stock rom backup?
Second is my Cyanogen backup?
Say I do a third backup (it appears third right)? Will it be my Cyanogen backup *plus* all my added stuff I've done since then? Like widgets, contacts, email account setups?
*ROM Recovery
- So as a noob I'd like to play around a bit. But I'd also like to populate my phone with backgrounds (sd card), contacts, ringtones (sd card), Apps (sd and main mem) etc.
Say I want to move from my current rom (cyanogen 6) to say MUIMUI (sp?) in a week. When I goto Bootloader recovery and select the Muigungui.zip, will it still keep the phone "mine" on restore?
Thanks a lot for your help guys! I hope to join the Nexus One discussions now too after this my first post!
Your Nandroid backups are named by date and time of your backup.
Every backup you make, backups ALL user-accessible partitions on the phone. That includes pretty much EVERYTHING, both system (ROM) and data (everything else). All the rest of your questions have answers logically derived from this statement, please use the required logic.
Your SD card doesn't have anything unless you made it - which is obviously not the case, or previous owner made it - which is also obviously not the case, since you had stock ROM.
Thank you Jack.
I understand better now.
On looking at my sd folder structure, I see:
sdcard/HT096P800012/BCDES-date-4 numbers
Does the HT096P800012 subfolder stay the same, or does nandroid add more HT subfolders in time. (just a curiousity question)
In the 4 numbers part, if I did two backups on 201001103, does the higher number indicate the most latest backup by the logic you describe?
also, some backup folders have nandroid.md5 as a file and some don't. What is that?
Nerdy questions I know. I do thank you for your help?
(PS: If I update my radio with a new one, that doesn't affect my phone proper right?)
The upper folder stays the same - it's the name of your device.
4 numbers are hours and minutes
nandroid.md5 is MD5 sum of the backup, for verification. Not needed for restoring, AFAIK.
Radio doesn't affect your phone in any bad way, as long as it's compatible with your OS (radios for Eclair were different from radios for Froyo), and as long as you're flashing it correctly, without removing the power from the phone when it's in process of flashing.
Thank you so much!
Hi,
This is my first time with android - that's why I'm trying SD.
All went ok for about 3 days - I tried many apps from the market & all of a sudden my phone rebooted!
When it booted again I saw the lock screen & can see the tiny icons on the status bar then it just reboot again!
After several attempts I got it booting but most of the apps now force close - my contacts are gone so as my SMS.
Any idea what might caused something like that? is Android so vulnerable that
installing some application can cause a total loss of the system?
- Do I need to re-install every thing again?
- will deleting data.img is enough to force a clean install?
- Is there a way to restore my old data from data.img?
- Is there a recommended book to upgrade from a noob to an educated user?
Thanks,
it's strange because when Americn android craches, it should bootloop.
here's a couple of suggestions:
backup the valuable contents of your SD card then search for file system errors, if your card has a corrupt file here and there it might be the one causing the problem, for the how to, it's in my troubleshooter, check my sig.
Usually a fresh data.img file is considered a clean install unless you've messed with root explorer (or any similar app) and did something wrong to your sytem files.
I'm not sure how to get the data back, I know you can access the data.img contents using a special tool, see here for info http://www.howtoforge.com/access-linux-partitions-from-windows
there's also a tool on softpedia to do so.
but you can try to look for the SMS data somewhere on your data.img, extract them to your harddrive, then copy them back using android explorer. I haven't tried it, and theoretically it might work, but I can not guarantee it.
My advice is that don't put too much pressure on the device, it's running Android from the SD which is not designed to work as NAND. let the device take a breath for a few seconds after each installation, it may say it finished, but it's still doing something in the background, I learned that the hard way. and always backup our data before you do something new.
and yes, if you use a fresh data.img you will have to install everything again.
If you ever used CWM, CWMT or other non factory recoveries to wipe your data, you probably noticed that you lost the ability to encrypt your phone. Or maybe you did not even realize this is why encryption does not work.
For the Android phone encryption to work, it needs the /data (usrdata) partition to have a little bit of unused space between the end of the filesystem and the end of the partition. And as soon as you use CWM to wipe, it actually reformats using all space, and encryption does not work anymore.
User lolo250612 brought this to my attention, and together we created a update.zip that shrinks the /data filesystem by 1MB
In fact, we created 2 patches: One to shrink, and one to first repair the filesystem. The first will refuse to shrink if the file system is not clean and healthy. They will automatically find the correct usrdata partition device and its size. The shrink will then resize to 1MB less then the partition size (which means it could also be used to grow if you somehow had a filesystem a lot smaller, for example because you restored an smaller image from somewhere).
Both patches are created with statically linked e2fsprogs binaries and its own static copy of busybox shell interpreter. So they should work on all Android devices that use ext file system (probably all V2.3.1 Gingerbread and higher androids), and you should not lose any data because of this. But it is always good to make a backup.
We tested this on 2 phones, both ICS phones, and with both CWM and TWRP type recoveries, and are fairly certain it is safe to use. But to repeat, you should always take a backup of your phone.
Both patches can be found on my shared drive:
ICS_usrdata_fix-fs.zip
ICS_usrdata_shrink.zip
Procedure:
- Make backup of your phone
- Place files on SD card
- Boot into recovery
- Apply the shrink update
- If it tells you the filesystem is damaged apply the fix-fs update first
The patch only shrinks the filesystem, nothing is actually installed or removed on the phone. But if you use encryption, you could leave this patch on your SD card so that every time you wipe data, you can run the shrink patch again afterward to enable encryption again.
If you do use this, please report back in this thread, possibly mentioning your phone model and ROM you are using.
Quick encryption guide (and more)
I won't go deep into useless details as everything has already been described about Android phone protection somewhere on the internet. I will just give some meaningful links and tips by illustrating how I have protected my phone. Really nothing new or innovative, just a compilation of a few hints that I have put in practice to protect the numerous pieces of information that are on my phone.
Step 0: awareness
----------------------------
Why bother with phone security?
In short, I am clearly paranoid. Well, in fact, I don’t really feel at ease when I know all the information, both personal and professional I have on my phone. Over the month, my Androphone has become a real digital Swiss-knife and personal secretary. This includes:
Personal and professional contacts
Personal and professional agendas
Personal and professional digital exchanges (SMS and email)
Personal and professional photos
Banking account information
Trails where I run
Etc… etc…
Don't want someone looks at them. Not you?
Fist step: on-line protection
----------------------------------------
The first step in protecting your data consists in making hard to access indirectly the data that lay on your phone memory. This access consists in using the system when the phone is on, either via the GUI and the phone controls, or remotely (essentially by network connections, or phone basic functionalities like sms). So, basically, you need to lock efficiently your phone from preventing someone else to unlock the user interface that allows interactions with the system, and protect all communication channels.
To lock efficiently your phone, you must use a pin code of at least 4 digits (6 is better) or a pass-phrase. The latter is much less practical without improving online security that much. Above all, you must avoid those silly locking solutions like face recognition unlocking, or pattern lock. Those are toys for naive young boys. Not for those concerned seriously by security.
For protecting remote access to your phone, I would suggest:
1) Double check that USB debugging is disabled. This a major security hole.
2) Turn on data connections (bluetooth, wifi and 2/G/3G/4G) only when required (email checking, web-surfing session, data synchronising), and off rest of the time.
3) Avoid install cracked unofficial apks, or applications that asks for permission far beyond their obvious and principal utility
4) Install a software security app, if possible, open source and recognised by xda members. Once an adept of Droiwall, I have switched to Avast mobile security because of its extra features. But it is not opensource and it is a question of taste. But do this carefully, see that for instance before making a choice: http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-57391170-12/dont-get-faked-by-android-antivirus-apps/ and http://www.av-test.org/fileadmin/pdf/avtest_2012-02_android_anti-malware_report_english.pdf.
But, you must be rooted (which is in itself a security hole if not mastered) and one must have a kernel with netfilter functionalities activated. This is the case with the stock kernel of the phone I use at the present time (Lenovo A789). But was not the case of 2 Samsung phones I used before. You have to either install a custom kernel adapted to your phone, or make your own if you have access to its sources (see tutorials as: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=22941057&postcount=1)
5) Personally, I would feel more at ease if I could find an easy to use firewall solution that could close, and better, make stealth all the local ports of my phone, especially when I am not behind a wifi router. But I haven’t found one yet. Droidwall, nor Avast, addresses this functionality, whereas it would be fairly easy to implement it with the netfilter system layer underneath.
Second step: offline protection
-------------------------------------------
Here we are. Now your phone is protected when it is on. But, what if you switch it off, or remove its sdcard? The data lay on the internal memory, unprotected (at best obfuscated). Really easy to find a custom recovery for almost all phones, write a script to dump /data on a sdcard and then make whatever you want with the copy.
Don’t like that? The only solution to prevent /data from being read by someone else is to encrypt the /data partition. To do that, your phone or tablet internal storage partitions must be seen by your system as block devices. This is the case with eMMC but not with Yaffs. So beware, if you want encryption you need to buy a device that answers this requirement. This is not always true and almost never documented. Notes on the implementation of Android encryption are there: http://source.android.com/tech/encryption/android_crypto_implementation.html
Now, as me, if you are reading these lines, you are certainly looking for extra information about your Android device and probably extra functionalities.
Certainly, the most frequent way to install extra functionalities and custom ROMs to your phone is to use an update zip file. With stock recovery, this zip file needs to be signed, otherwise it is rejected. For maximum flexibility and ease of use, alternative boot recovery have been developed, of which CWRP is certainly the most famous.
Usually, for 99% of users and operations, CWRP operates great. Sometimes, as nothing is perfect, a bug may occur. This is the case for built in ICS encryption process. As Cybermaus indicates in the first post, to be able to perform this encryption the /data filesystem must be slightly smaller than the underlying partition. But CWRP, at least up to the version 5.5, formats all the corresponding partition leaving no place for Android to store the required information to be able to start the encryption process. This is clearly described in the following links: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1792101 and http://rootzwiki.com/topic/25652-fixing-galaxy-tab-2-encryption/
I have discovered that by using aLogcat to track down the origin of the failure. The interesting part revealed to be: E/Cryptfs ( 87): Orig filesystem overlaps crypto footer region. Cannot encrypt in place.
To circumvent this problem, you will find in Cybermaus first post, two CWM update zip files that will do the trick in a simple and secure way. After flashing your ROM and wiping data with CWM, apply them, go to system encryption as described here:http://support.google.com/android/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1663755, and after waiting one or two minutes (not more), the system should restart automagically to encrypt your /data partition.
Third step: making your phone even more secure and practical at the same time
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Android built-in encryption is in fact more or less Linux LUKS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Unified_Key_Setup). Plus, it is open-source so that everyone with the required skills can make an audit of the code to see if no security hole is present in the Android implementation. The underlying mechanism is strong and secure, as long as you use a strong password. I mean by strong, at least 12 characters that includes at the same time lower-case letters, upper-case letters, numbers and symbols. And it must be something impossible to guess for others while easy to remember for yourself. You will find a lot of resources on the internet on how to create such a password. For instance: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/StrongPasswords .
The problem with Android, in its attempt to keep the system not too complicated to use, is that the GUI (I insist: only the GUI, not the system) does not distinguish between the PIN or passphrase that you use to lock your phone when it is on, and the password used to encrypt the data that lay physically on your phone storage. So the casual user is in front of a paradigm: either he chooses a strong password for its data, but this will rapidly become tedious to type at least 12 characters to unlock his device several times a day; or he decides to use a PIN code, which is more practical to unlock the phone, and consequently uses a really weak password to encrypt its data which contains only digits, and thus may be cracked in a breath by any PC.
Fortunately, this paradigm is addressed and solved by small tools like EncPassChanger or Cryptfs Password (both requiring that your phone be rooted, which is by the way, paradoxically, a security hole if not used with caution ). See: http://nelenkov.blogspot.fr/2012/08/changing-androids-disk-encryption.html for complete notes about that. So for me, the only way, both secure and practical, to secure your phone is by using a PIN code of at least 4 numbers (6 is better). Then use a handy tool like EncPassChanger to have a true complex password for decryption at boot time.
Fourth step: increase security, without sacrifying practicability
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As I am paranoid, but at the same time don’t want my phone to become a source of annoyances, the previous “basic” steps were not enough for me.
So I decided to improve security in two ways:
1) By following the following tip, which I find great and is itself self-explaining: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=26730989&postcount=2
2) By encrypting the photos I take with my phone, because these are linked with my private life and I won’t like that somebody gain access to them.
3) By encrypting documents I scan with CamScanner, for home and work, which may be sensitive.
4) By automating the action that disables USB debugging in case I forget to put it off after using it .
For point 2 and 3, documents lay on your sd card uncrypted. Android built-in encryption does not deal with both internal and external sdcard (just to be clear, by sdcards I mean partitions mounted as /mnt/scard or /mnt/scard2). To encrypt them you have to use once again an external tool. As I am an opensource fanatic for all that deal with security, I would recommend to use LUKS Manager (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nemesis2.luksmanager&feature=search_result and http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1141467) which is based on dm-crypt module (yes, the same that Android uses for its build-in encryption), or Cryptonite (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=csh.cryptonite&feature=search_result) which is completely open-source and implements the rock-solid Linux encfs on Android.
The latter is my personal choice. I do not use Crytonite in itself, except for creating the initial .encfs6.xml file. For everyday use, I use directly the Android port of the binary file encfs that comes with Cryptonite, and embed it into shell scripts. Up to now, no flaw, no problem. The password to open my encfs encrypted volumes is stored in a text file located on the /data partition. It is thus encrypted by Android and made accessible on boot when you decrypt this partition. So nothing more to remember.
To make things usable and practical, I use Tasker to automate the following things:
- Mount encfs volumes on start-up, by reading directly the password in the file located on /data
- Umount encfs volumes when usb is plugged
- Copy photos on a regular basis from the unencrypted /mnt/sdcard/DCIM to the safe place I created with encfs, delete AND wipe the original ones
Fifth step: be coherent about security
-----------------------------------------------------
Some people, torn apart by the paradigm described in Third step, by negligence or by lack of knowledge, strongly secure one part of the system, but make other parts big security holes.
Concretely, I am thinking about two examples: mixing encryption with pattern lock (or, even worse, with face unlock), or mixing encryption with usb debugging. Face recognition is just a jock. It is not reliable and fails very often. Moreover it is really easy to crack, with a photo for example. One of my colleague even achieved to unlock my phone with its own face, just because we are morphologically close enough. Pattern lock is not much better. (See: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=37649447&postcount=6 and https://www.google.fr/search?q=smudge+attack).
So always ponder over (two times rather than one) each action you take that may touch system security.
Thanks lolo
I'm trying to use this on my VZW Galaxy S3 16Gb and this is what I'm seeing in TWRP v2.2.0:
Mounting System
Extracting system fixes
Update script starting...
Update script started
Disk /dev/block/mmcblk0p15: 13.1GB, 13140754432
4 heads, 10 sectors/track, 401024 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 64 * 512 = 32768 bytes
ERROR: unlikely size of KB
aborting operation!
Update script ended
Unmounting system...
Update Complete
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
edit: The same thing happens with both scripts.
I need to enable device encryption because my employer requires it for email and other Google Apps for Business apps. Thank you for your help!
Anyone know why full disk encryption isn't available on some (if not most roms)? Is it something that needs to be added with intent aside in the building process, or dependent on how the stock rom was set-up to work with?
I was hoping this would help get encryption working on an EVO ics rom which has encryption available, but when you click "encrypt phone" it just hangs on an android screen and doesn't actually do anything.
i was really happy to find your solution to enable encryption on my HTC desire S (ICS, rooted), but unfotunately it doesn't work. the same thing happen to me as it happened to mushu13, only different numbers in lines 5 and 6. same result whichever script i choose. please help, i really need system encryption.
thanky you very much!
First thing you should know, I am not an Android Guru. And unfortunately, if your phone is not an A789, I won't be able to help you deep in technical details. Cybermaus is the most skilled of the two of us, technically speaking, and he may lack time to answer correctly every request he is regurlarly faced with.
Okay, I do not know your phones and don't own them. So, distant debugging is much harder in these conditions. But the first things you should check, before applying Cybermaus' patches, are :
1) if encryption works with stock rom
2) follow thoroughly all steps I described in "Second step: offline protection" of the second post of this thread :
- your phone or tablet internal storage partitions must be seen by your system as block devices. This is the case with eMMC but not with Yaffs. If you don't have this information from the manufacturer, install Terminal Emulator from the Play Store and type 'mount' in it. You should see lines beginning with /[email protected] and /[email protected] If this is not the case, I fear encryption won't be able to work on your device.
- use aLogcat to track down the origin of the failure (see resources on the internet to learn how to use it, and links I have put in the second post)
3) Be sure that required modules are built into the kernel you use, especially dm-crypt
4) Post your results and cross your fingers that either this is a problem I have already encountered (in this case I may help you further), or Cybermaus see your posts.
While this script did allow me to encrypt my phone, it also shrunk my /data partition to roughly 1.1 GB.
Any ideas on how to expand it back to a reasonable size? I supposedly have 4 GB of ROM, and I assume more than 1 GB ought to be available for data.
Sent from my HTC Sensation using xda app-developers app
Thank you for your nice guide.
Only one thing is missing: baseband security.
Attacks on the baseband system requires very skilled people. Such as government agencies. It is believed they use baseband attacks to break into almost every mobile device. And there is only little you can do. Some vendors like Cryptophone have mobile devices with a hardened Android system. All others have no way to protect their device against baseband attacks.
Is this patch and reasoning still valid for newer android releases.
I am running a custom kitkat rom and twrp on a note 3 and can't encrypt so im looking for a fix.
I have been looking around for fixes but different posts blame different things.
Sometimes its the fact its a custom recovery, sometimes its that root is on the device and then there is this reasoning
Is there a way to find out the cause and fix for kitkat?
Virus
Hi, i tried to download your files
ICS_usrdata_fix-fs.zip
ICS_usrdata_shrink.zip
But the file are exe files with viruses.
Any ideas?
u2funker said:
Hi, i tried to download your files
ICS_usrdata_fix-fs.zip
ICS_usrdata_shrink.zip
But the file are exe files with viruses.
Any ideas?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Maybe false alarm.
Lossyx said:
Maybe false alarm.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
no, but if you search for these file, you will find some which work and which are without viruses. Check the link..it is not an zip file..it is an exe file
@cybermaus: just tried flashing the two *.zips on my Galaxy S 4 Mini running CM 12 (Android Lollipop) because my logcat tells me I'm getting the described cryptfs error. It seems my /data partition doesn't have that 1 MB of unused space needed for encryption. Now I would love to encrypt my phone using CM's integrated function without having to completely format the internal storage (because that's the other workaround I found: flash stock rom, wipe data (factory reset), flash Custom Recovery, flash CM again)
Do you have the time and device to update your script so it works with Android Lollipop as well? I see a lot of people come across this issue recently so there would be definetly use for such a nice script like yours!
Thanks for sharing this with us!
-Teutone
no available for download any mirror ?
Or write the script on the thread.
Thanks
Can you post the scripts? links are dead!
---------- Post added at 16:33 ---------- Previous post was at 16:32 ----------
cybermaus said:
If you ever used CWM, CWMT or other non factory recoveries to wipe your data, you probably noticed that you lost the ability to encrypt your phone. Or maybe you did not even realize this is why encryption does not work.
For the Android phone encryption to work, it needs the /data (usrdata) partition to have a little bit of unused space between the end of the filesystem and the end of the partition. And as soon as you use CWM to wipe, it actually reformats using all space, and encryption does not work anymore.
User lolo250612 brought this to my attention, and together we created a update.zip that shrinks the /data filesystem by 1MB
In fact, we created 2 patches: One to shrink, and one to first repair the filesystem. The first will refuse to shrink if the file system is not clean and healthy. They will automatically find the correct usrdata partition device and its size. The shrink will then resize to 1MB less then the partition size (which means it could also be used to grow if you somehow had a filesystem a lot smaller, for example because you restored an smaller image from somewhere).
Both patches are created with statically linked e2fsprogs binaries and its own static copy of busybox shell interpreter. So they should work on all Android devices that use ext file system (probably all V2.3.1 Gingerbread and higher androids), and you should not lose any data because of this. But it is always good to make a backup.
We tested this on 2 phones, both ICS phones, and with both CWM and TWRP type recoveries, and are fairly certain it is safe to use. But to repeat, you should always take a backup of your phone.
Both patches can be found on my shared drive:
ICS_usrdata_fix-fs.zip
ICS_usrdata_shrink.zip
Procedure:
- Make backup of your phone
- Place files on SD card
- Boot into recovery
- Apply the shrink update
- If it tells you the filesystem is damaged apply the fix-fs update first
The patch only shrinks the filesystem, nothing is actually installed or removed on the phone. But if you use encryption, you could leave this patch on your SD card so that every time you wipe data, you can run the shrink patch again afterward to enable encryption again.
If you do use this, please report back in this thread, possibly mentioning your phone model and ROM you are using.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
links are dead. Can you post the scripts?