My Tecno Spark 10 Pro (MediaTek Helio G88, Android 12) bootlooped after a banking app froze. Now it boots straight into stock recovery with the message that Android cannot be loaded and data may be corrupt. The bootloader is unlocked. I hooked it up to an Android tablet via OTG with Bugjaeger. The device uses A/B partitioning and was running on slot b. I switched it to slot a via fastboot, but slot a gives the exact same recovery loop, so the issue is clearly a corrupted userdata partition failing to mount during early init. All I need is my local KeePass database file from internal storage. I know modern Android uses File-Based Encryption with keys sealed in the TEE, but since my bootloader is unlocked, is there any known way via fastboot, MTK tools, or custom boot images to extract or decrypt that single file before I wipe the device? Or is it completely unrecoverable once the filesystem fails to mount?

  • frongt@lemmy.zip
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    1 day ago

    Can you dirty flash a ROM? But if it’s really a corrupt user data partition, probably not recoverable with the tools at hand. Maybe if it’s possible to take a dump of the device, then decrypt and run file recovery on the partition image.

    But I’m not familiar with that process. If it’s valuable to you, I’d pay a data recovery service.

    Also, this is why you should have backups.