Hot Tub Phone Re­pair

The Splashening

You shouldn't be al­lowed to have nice things when you forget your phone in your swim­suit pocket— not once, but twice! The first time was a Mo­torola Razr. I was swim­ming at my grand­ma's condo and came out of the pool with a drip­ping flip phone.

Cell­phone Nos­talgia

A couple of my friends' par­ents worked at Mo­torola, so somehow I got my hands on a lot of unique de­vices at an early age. One of my all-time fa­vorites was the Mo­torola "MO­TOROI" XT720, which fea­tured An­droid 2.0 and a 720MHz mo­bile processor.

I ended up rooting this phone— and it's still run­ning! Here's a re­view from 2010, when it was re­leased:

huge 3.7 inch, high-de­f­i­n­i­tion WVGA (480x854) dis­play, making it easy to view full page web­sites, videos, games, or photos.

Okay. This post is Hot Tub Phone Re­pair, not Hot Tub Time Ma­chine. So I'll stop pon­dering the evo­lu­tion of mo­bile tech­nology and get to the point! I was on a busi­ness trip on the west coast when I com­pletely drowned my Galaxy S7 in the hotel's hot tub.

This might have been my longest lasting phone— 3 years and not a scratch! But it didn't matter. That ex­pen­sive Ot­terBox and "water re­sis­tant" label couldn't save this cell­phone from get­ting blasted by a Jacuzzi jet for 50 min­utes. It was bricked.🧱 🧱 🧱

Luckily one of my co-workers had the fore­sight to re­move the Mi­croSD card. My first thought was to shake the water out at at his face like the pope waving an as­pergillum on Easter.

Spoiler alert: I didn't fix the phone. 😞️ That's a mis­leading title... I did, how­ever, manage to re­cover my photos from a cor­rupt SD card!

When I first put the SD card into my PC, I was met with a dis­ap­pointing mes­sage from Win­dows:

Adapter Des­per­a­tion...

Most people are aware of the fact that for­mat­ting re­moves all the de­vice's data. So, ob­vi­ously this is not what I was hoping for, but... Thank Po­seidon! I tried an­other Mi­croSD adapter, and I was able to ac­cess files on the card.

I didn't re­ally care about my apps, but I hadn't backed up my photos or videos for a year. I hate Google Photos and all that "cloud" bull­shit, but now it was re­ally biting me in the ass... If there's one thing you need to take away from this ar­ticle, it's backup your photos.

Even though I could see all my photos, al­most all of them were cor­rupt! Reading the files di­rectly from the card re­vealed hor­i­zontal strips and chunks of the image over a pix­e­lated (green?) color. I tried to copy the im­ages to my PC, but every­thing was trapped on the card.

Re­covery Re­search

A quick Google search led me to ddrescue . While this seems like an in­cred­ible re­covery tool, it was un­able to build a us­able image from the SD card... 🤔️

The im­ages were read­able from the card, but weren't dis­playing cor­rectly (or at all). I couldn't copy them onto my local ma­chine... So, fi­nally, I thought— per­haps I could re­cover the broken im­ages by com­piling them into a video?

In the past, I'd used ffmpeg to con­vert in­di­vidual stills to a video file. After an­other quick search, I dis­cov­ered that ffmpeg not only has built-in error de­tec­tion on the input frames; but it will also au­to­mat­i­cally dis­card ir­recov­er­ably cor­rupt frames.

A post on Stack­Over­flow gave me what I needed. The user had the "-er­r_de­tect ag­gres­sive" flag on an rtsp stream in an at­tempt to clean the in­coming live footage.

FFMpeg Saves the Day!

Eu­reka! A simple ffmpeg com­mand using the same error de­tec­tion flag within the image di­rec­tory man­aged to re­cover every photo into a video file!

After that, I opened the video in Adobe Pre­miere and did a simple frame ex­port to re­trieve all the in­di­vidual im­ages! 😍️ Okay, I'll admit, this was a pretty unique sit­u­a­tion...

Aside from that awful feeling of being without a de­vice for a week, the last thing you want is to lose years of photos and mem­o­ries. So, if any of you enjoy warm, bubbly tubs with your mo­bile de­vices, per­haps you can learn some­thing from my ex­pe­ri­ence. Of course, I hope you can all avoid this dis­aster with the oc­ca­sional backup!