Posting here in case someone has the same issue and comes across this through a web search. Feel free to comment below.
While using the Motorola Moto G6 Play, it suddenly rebooted and showed "N/A" on an otherwise black boot screen. It proceeded to boot to the Android lock screen (the one with black background, before the rest of Android is started), but refused to accept the CORRECT Android PIN anymore on the lock screen. After having tried for a while, I got a warning saying that I had only less than 10 tries left until all data would be wiped from the device.
I contacted a professional data recovery service company in one of the major German cities and described the issue. They quoted me "from €499,00" for data recovery. So it seems like from the error description, they were positive that they could recover the data.
Googling showed that the "N/A" on an otherwise black boot screen normally has to do with unlocked bootloaders, but the bootloader on this device never had been unlocked. fastboot getvar all says (bootloader) securestate: oem_locked, iswarrantyvoid: no`.
Booting into stock Recovery, one can view log files. Looks like the Moto G6 play has a "dm-verity corruption" because in Recovery looking at last.log I found androidboot.verifiedbootstate=red? Is this related with the fact that the phone shows "N/A" on the bootscreen? (Edit: Apparently not directly; it still says this after the completion of the fix when "N/A" is fixed.)
I speculate that if the phone determines that something is wrong with the "verified boot process", it will not accept even the CORRECT Android PIN anymore on the lock screen.
So my idea was to flash the original stock firmware but without deleting user data to see whether this might fix the issue.
But how to get the correct original stock firmware? There are many shady sites out there that offer some firmware that might work on the device, but might just as well be in a slightly different configuration (hardware variant, geographical region, retail channel, etc). I wanted to get the firmware from the manufacturer and be sure that it is the 100% correct one. Motorola has a Windows tool called "Rescue and Smart Assistant (LMSA)" that will require a Moto ID but can download stock firmware images if you give it the IMEI of your phone. It can also flash the phone but in doing so will delete user data.
But you can just download the stock firmware image for your phone using "Rescue and Smart Assistant (LMSA)" and then use a third-party tool, MotoFlashPro on Windows from https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/utility-motoflashpro.4252201/, to flash the image WITHOUT deleting user data. IMPORTANT: Flash servicefile.xml (which will not delete user data), NOT flashfile.xml (which WILL DELETE user data)!
After flashing, it started to boot to the lockscreen. I noticed that the lockscreen at this point did NOT show the message I had entered there for people to see in case the phone gets lost, which before it had shown.
While it said verifying I pressed vol up/down so that the screen does not go blank. It then proceeded to boot, showing the "Powered by android" boot screen. First boot took really long, but then the animated M logo appeared. It is as if it was doing some slow background process, maybe check the filesystem?
Then it showed the Android lockscreen, this time with a background image. Entering the corrent PIN on the Android lock screen WORKED this time, I am in and my data is still THERE!
- Saved me from buying a new phone (which are all unsatisfactory as of Mid-2022 due to having too large screens)
- Saved me from paying "from €499,00"
- Regularly back up the data on your phone (we have all heard it, but who actually does it?)
- Security can work against you - you can be locked out from your own data (in my case it was just months of photos)
- Maybe one should just use a microSD card in the phone to store all photos there. Should anything go wrong with the phone, the photos can easily be accessed, just like with a digital camera
For what that data recovery firm wanted you probably could have had a brand new device, plus data previously and regularily backed up restored to it from your desktop(NOT the cloud).
Lots of things can force a factory reset, plus phones can be stolen, hacked, or just plain dropped into the toliet etc. I do not deem a valuble file to exist until I have copies of it on two different devices.
Phones should never be backed up to Google or Apple because that makes the data accessable to adversaries armed with a warrant or with a hacker inside, but things like photos, videos, and text files can be exported off the device over USB at intervals-or immediately if valuble. Critical communications apps like Signal are increasingly finding ways to allow recovery of account data on a new device/same phone number or same device/new phone number.
If you had no critical data on the phone, a forced factory reset followed by restoring data from backups and reconfiguring (maybe two hours to strip crapware under ADB and lock out Google's trackers) may be quicker than trying to reflash with anything, unless of course you already have that recovery image on hand (itself a good idea) and have flashed a phone before.
Just like reminding people that just because ransomware on linux is rare doesn't mean they cannot lose their data. Anything ransomware can do, one bad sector in an encrypted disk's LUKS header can do to the same level of non-recoverability, and one disk crash can do if the data is too sensitive to send the drive to anyone else for work. Disks and HDD's die, power surges kill whole devices, homes and offices flood or burn with devices inside, you name it. Back up your data and don't keep it all in one building either.