[GUIDE] [HOW TO] Recover Data from a Locked Tablet

Frederuco

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Staff member
Jul 6, 2011
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Many users may at some point forget their unlock password/pattern for their Transformer.

PART 1 - HOW TO RECOVER YOUR DEVICE USING A GOOGLE ACCOUNT

The best way to gain access to your tablet is to fail the password or pattern 5 times and you should see this:
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After tapping the OK box, there will be a ? Forgot pattern? button you can tap.
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Enter your Google Credentials to unlock.
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You will be dumped to settings to set a new password/pattern for your tablet.

In order for this to work, you MUST have WiFi turned on and be near a network that you have connected to prior to locking your tablet. Some tablets have the ability to toggle WiFi status with a hardware switch. If you do not, then it is almost impossible to get your WiFi turned on.​

But, what happens if your WiFi is off and you want to recover your data?

If you happened to have turned on the USB Debugging in Settings - Developer Options, you are in luck. Otherwise, you will have to wipe the data and say goodbye and start over.​

PART 2 - RECOVERING YOUR DATA USING ADB

NOTE: THIS WILL ONLY WORK IF YOU HAVE USB DEBUGGING ENABLED IN SETTING PRIOR TO FORGETTING YOUR PASSWORD! IF USB DEBUGGING IS NOT CHECKED, THIS METHOD WILL NOT WORK!

This has been tested on both rooted and unrooted Android 4.X tablets and will work for unrooted tablets.

First, you may be asking what is ADB. This is Android Debug Bridge. It is a way to connect to your tablet to move files around, access the terminal and some other debugging things. ADB is part of the Android SDK (Software Development Kit). You can get that here if you are interested: Android SDK | Android Developers

Keep in mind the SDK is about 400 MB in size, and you only need the ADB.exe file and a few associated dll's for it to run (total of 312 KB).

So, I would recommend getting the PERI tool from ThingODoom here: [TOOL] PERI-V0.4: One click root+recovery Fix bootloops+soft-bricks ALL ICS Firmware!. We are NOT going to run the PERI tool, just use some of the files in it. This package contains the Universal Naked Drivers from XDA that work with MOST Android devices. If they do not work with your device, do a google search for the ADB drivers for your device.

Download and extract the PERI tool to an easy to get to directory (We will use C:\PERI)
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Next, plug your tablet in to your PC via a USB cable. You should hear a new hardware found sound. Remove any microSD cards, SD cards or USB devices as we do not need to pull the data from them. You can leave them in, but it will pull the data across via USB and is not necessary.

Open device manager (Control Panel - System - Device Manager)

If USB Debugging is checked, you should see 2 devices, one will be a Portable Device, the other will be either under Other Devices or at the top under ASUS or Android Devices:
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Right click on the device and choose to UPDATE DRIVER.

Choose the option to Browse:
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Point the wizard to the C:\PERI directory:
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Confirm that you want to install the driver anyway:
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Now the driver should be installed properly. Reboot if prompted.

Next, we need to open a command prompt. Hold WIN+R and type CMD and tap OK.
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In the command window, type the following code:
Code:
c:
cd c:\PERI
adb devices

You should see something like this:
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Be sure it shows a device listed.

Next, we need to pull the files from your tablet. Type in the following code:

Code:
adb pull / c:\Android\

that is adb[SPACE]pull[SPACE]/[SPACE]c:\Android\

You will probably see a bunch of messages flying by about skipping special files. That is normal.

For 1 GB of data to pull via a USB 2.0 Connection it takes approximately 10 minutes. If you have a 64 GB tablet that is full, expect it to take an hour or more to pull the data across. Even longer if you left a full microSD or SD card in the tablet.

Once the pull is complete, the command window will be showing a C:\PERI> prompt. Now you can go look through the files you pulled from your tablet by going to C:\Android\ directory. The files from your internal storage should be in the c:\Android\mnt\sdcard\ directory (or c:\Android\sdcard\).

Now that you have recovered your files, you can proceed to do a factory reset on your tablet.​

See this guide here for how to factory reset: [HOW TO] Perform a Factory Reset

Note: This will not back up app data in a way that is easy or possible to restore, it is mainly to back up any important files, documents, etc.
 
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