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I have an HTC Once Mini that will not boot.

It has stock firmware on it (no root, no replaced bootloader, no custom recovery, just plain old stock HTC firmware).

It will start to the bootloader and responds to various fastboot commands, but will not boot to either Android or to the recovery. When I try to boot it to Android it simply reboots itself after a few moments. Likewise when I try to boot to recovery, but here it drops me back to the fastboot menu and says that bootup failed.

It is under warranty and will be returned to the shop, but I really want to extract the photos I took before it went belly up. There was no MicroSD card in it so the photos are on the internal storage.

I do not want to reflash anything or unlock the bootloader as it will be going back to the shop once I have recovered the photos and I don't want them throwing it back at me saying I invalidated the warranty.

All my searching seems to point to the same set of answers - using adb to retrieve the data, but as I can't get to either Android or recovery, adb is of no use to me here. I have read mention of some way to use fastboot to retrieve files, but my Google-Fu doesn't seem to help me actually find good set of instructions (and the fastboot help doesn't seem to give any clear indication of how you can use it to this end).

Any thoughts?

Thanks. Grant.:)

Izzy
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Grant
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  • Our fastboot tag-wiki points to an article holding a List of fastboot commands. I've not tried the following (hence no answer), but what might work is booting a different "system" via fastboot boot <kernel> [ <ramdisk> ] in the hope that works, then mount the storage, and try pulling its contents (or simply creating an image of that partition and pulling that, to extract data on your PC). – Izzy Nov 11 '14 at 16:40
  • @Izzy, I like that idea. Any pointers on where to get a working kernel and initrd to boot from using this method? So long as it has the rudimentary Linux commands available, I'm happy to "adb shell" in (if possible) or ssh if adb isn't around. – Grant Nov 11 '14 at 18:57
  • I'd check at XDA in the area for the device, or take a look at Where can I find stock or custom ROMs for my Android device? Sorry I cannot give you a direct link to those details, but I simply don't know. Keep us updated how it worked out :) – Izzy Nov 11 '14 at 19:42
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    Ok, it would seem that I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place with this.

    Because the bootloader is still locked it won't let me boot another image via fastboot. In order to unlock the bootloader it would seem that I would lose the data on the phone. I can get the kernel sources for this phone from HTC, and I can create my own boot image, but because it isn't signed, it still won't boot on a locked bootloader.

    So, I can send the phone back to the store under warranty and lose the photos, or I can unlock the bootloader so I can boot an alternative image, and lose the photos that way. Ouch!

     – Grant Nov 13 '14 at 20:00

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