I have /e/ on a Le x526 (One of the first phones supported by /e/). The screen has cracked and the touch interface is un-usable. Some of my contacts are synced with ecloud.global but not all, the newer ones are missing. Almost none of my photos and videos are synced with the cloud due to the size limit.
I can mount the internal storage on my laptop via usb cable when the phone is in recovery. I have recovered the pictures and videos from this file system.
How can I get the contacts off the phone?Are the contacts stored in a file accessible on this drive or are they on another partition? If on another partition how can I mount it?
Is there a way to use /e/ without the touch interface? e.g. connecting a mouse?
Android in general has mouse drivers built-in. I just tried myself and they are present in /e/, too.
Just connect a USB mouse or the USB receiver of a wireless mouse to the phone via a USB OTG adapter.
As long as you can still see what you are doing on the screen, this should work.
(A physical keyboard would work this way, too.)
However, I am struggling to activate adb in /e/. The only mode that the phone is accessible in is via adb while in recovery mode.
When I boot into /e/ adb is not activated any more.
I tried to activate adb in /e/ from recovery mode by following this and this but not joy. Is there a way to achieve this?
Is there a way to query the /e/ contacts form adb in recovery mode?
Yes you can export contacts while in recovery (TWRP)
It’s quite simple, they are stored in a SQLite database.
First, while in recovery, connect from an ADB-enabled computer : adb devices
Then copy the databases (you may notice the calllog BTW) : adb pull /data/data/com.android.providers.contacts/databases/
Now you can browse and export data from contacts2.db using SQLite tools like SQLiteStudio or DB Browser for SQLite.
Hint : take a look at “view_data” view
I spent some time trying to activate Developer mode & USB debugging from TWRP, I didn’t succeed
I think that your best option would be to buy an OTG adapter and connect a mouse …
I was lucky enough to come back with a method to activate ADB from TWRP recovery
But it’s not easy …
First, grab a text editor and a hex editor. On my Windows computer, I used the excellent Notepad++ with the HexEdit plugin (it can be installed directly from Notepad++ plugins manager) .
Next, boot your device to TWRP, ensure “Data” is mounted using TWRP touch interface, then grab the files :
take a breath, save the file
Why do we have to do that ? Well, both values are binary lengths (3 for value, 29 for the whole line). It’s not very common for Android nowadays, but we have to deal with it …
@smu44 Thanks v much for this. Worked well. My goodness Android contacts database seems like a mess!! I opened with DBbrowser and just copied and pasted the one or two new key contacts that were not synced at the time of screen breakage.