Last-chance recover - any ideas?

[larry5b6]

I've got a Sprint Galaxy S6 SM-G920P which I was doing a routine battery replacement on, but when I reassembled it and tried to power it up, it got stuck with a dark screen and throbbing blue indicator LED. I'm not able to do a volume-down + power reset, and I tried multiple times to boot into safe mode, but with the screen black I can't tell when to push volume down.

When I connect it to a PC via USB, it's detected as a USB device but does not link up as an MTP device, so I can't map the drives, and KIES won't work. I installed android-data-recovery, but the SM-G920P was not on the list of devices for broken phone recovery.

I've written the phone off, but I'd really like to recover the photos. Any ideas or suggestions? I don't mind soldering.

Thanks,

LR

 

[Dannydet]

Did you happen to have Google photos installed and running? It would have all of your photos backed up to the cloud

 

[larry5b6]

Not backed up on Google, Samsung, or anywhere else. This is my spouse's phone - *my* phone is always backed up

 

[svim]

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Samsung+Galaxy+S6+Battery+Replacement/44648
Going off your description and looking at the battery replacement guide for a S6 on the iFixit site, it sounds like the motherboard has been damaged while extracting the battery. Given there's a lot of adhesives and glues involved, if enough heat wasn't applied properly, or too much of it, and/or too much prying of internal components cracked the logic board or broke a solder joint, that could have caused enough damage so the phone just can't boot up any longer. This is just speculation of course but if the phone was working before the battery replacement process and now it won't boot up at all, the chances of getting anything off of the internal storage chip don't look promising.
You might want to try re-doing the whole battery replacement process, just in case you might have missed something. But if the phone is now bricked, odds of retrieving data isn't likely. The NAND Flash chip itself is shown here (also from iFixit):

(the chip highlighted in red)

 

[larry5b6]

I was pretty gentle, but clearly I broke something. This would have been the second battery swap, so possibly something was weakened the first time around (not done by me), and it finally gave up the ghost on my watch.

I'm going to take another look to see if anything is obviously broken, but I'm increasingly thinking this is a lost cause. I suppose there's a world in which I remove the NAND Flash and install it in another (working) phone, but that's above my pay grade.

My own phone is an antique Galaxy S5. Removable battery, and if this happened to me I'd just pop out the microSD and stick it in my PC. I may never get rid of the thing.