My ZMAX Z970 can't be rooted, at least by me. I can't find where to do that.  I accidentally deleted some videos which were on my sd card.  I have not used the card too much since then and don't plan to until I get this resolved.  I can't find any undelete utility or method that a) is not a scam b) doens't need root access and c) actually works.  How can I do it?  Meta:  If you think this is a duplicate question, please make sure the duplicate actually has a viable answer to my question. Thanks!  The question pointed to as duplicate does not explain how to use the software on an Android phone or make it see the disk from the PC. I tried the software mentioned in that article and it does not see my phone, only local PC disks. Please enable a fresh answer that breaks it down step by step for SD card on no root android phone. Thanks.
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Background:    I put in a friend's SD Card to format it because it was having problems. Then I put mine back in and I think my phone formatted my SD Card. I had a ton of pictures on there that are now gone! I put the card into the computer and there's only 2mb of cache files on there and none of the original directories.   I already tried the following freeware recovery applications:         Neither of them were able to retrieve any files. Undelete took 1minute to scan for files and came up with 0 files.  Recuva took 10 minutes for their "deep scan" which doesn't seem thorough enough at all for this 8GB SD Card. I need something that's a lot more heavy duty.  I don't mind paying for an application to get the data back if necessary...   Questions:     Which application can I use to recover my deleted picture files from my 8GB HD Micro SD Card?   Why did Anroid format my SD card?   How can I tell if it's a phone problem, data problem, or SD Card problem?
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A couple years ago, it was easy to root any device: Install KingRoot, KingoRoot, or a similar app, hit the large ROOT button, and let it do the rest. After 5 minutes or so, a green "Root Succeeded!" prompt will pop up, and we can choose to keep the root app, or uninstall it and install a clean root manager app like SuperSU/Superuser.  How do they work? Why aren't they working anymore? And if they work, should I use them or not?
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I am trying to help a friend who is very concerned that she has just lost all of the data on her 32GB SanDisk microSD card.  I told her I would post this and see if anyone could offer help.  Here are the details:   The SanDisk microSD card is less than two years old.  Probably only about a year old.  The store will take it back, but that doesn't really help.  She wants her data. She used the card in her Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone for over a month.  The phone was never exposed to water or temperature extremes. Today, her phone suddenly said something like "Your SD card is blank or an unsupported format". Her phone was then unable to read the SanDisk microSD card at all.   Here's what she has tried:   Rebooting her phone.  Had no effect. Taking out the SanDisk microSD card and putting it inside a full-size SD card adapter, and inserting it into a Windows 7 SP1 computer.  The computer did not recognize its presence at all. Putting the SanDisk microSD card into a USB 2.0 external card reader and inserting the card reader into a USB port on a Windows 7 SP1 computer.  The computer recognized the card reader and installed drivers for it.  The card reader shows up as 'Removable Disk' in Windows Explorer.  Clicking on 'Removable Disk' in Windows Explorer results in the error "Insert disk: Please insert a disk into the Removable Disk". After trying #3, tried opening the 'Removable Disk' in FreeCommander.  Doing so results in the error "The device is not ready".   She does not have access to a linux box, but does have access to her Android phone.  What can she do to recover the data on her 32GB SanDisk microSD card?
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Or, how do I root my device without a rooter?  Rooting instructions for Android devices that I have seen are typically of the following form:   Download Gingerbreak.apk Run Gingerbreak, click “root device” Observe that Superuser.apk has been magically installed, possibly along with busybox and other things, and enjoy your rooty goodness.   What I am wanting to know is this: how does the rooting actually happen? What does Gingerbreak do?  I understand the end result of rooting:   su is present and working Superuser.apk is installed and controls access to su Various utilities are present, provided by BusyBox (optional?)   I also think I understand the basic idea of how Gingerbreak gets started — it exploits some local privilege escalation vulnerability and uses its new-found powers to deploy Superuser and whatever else is necessary.  So, unless I am wrong in some of the understanding I laid out above, the core of thing I want to know is what the root installer does to deploy and activate Superuser. It seems that just putting Superuser.apk in the right place wouldn't be enough — how does it get allowed root access? How does it get hooked up to moderate that access for other applications?  What does Gingerbreak do post-exploit to enable and secure root access?
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Is there a good way for shredding my Android's free space to ensure data cannot be recovered? I want to permanently shred my deleted files in free space. I have heard of secure eraser and ishredder.
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On a Samsung Galaxy S4 Google Play Edition running 4.4 and non-rooted (I'd prefer not to root a device used for professional development purposes)  Having stored some ebooks on my external SDcard, I decided that I wanted to add some audio as well (as my internal device storage is quite full.)  As far as I can tell not one app (nor adb) can perform any write operations to the external SDcard's root directory.  The one exception that I've found is that my ubuntu computer, can create and rename directories inside /storage/extSdCard/Android/data/ even though none of my apps can.  Is there a workaround for this that doesn't involve rooting the device?
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Does anyone know what exactly does Google backup (and restore) when you enable that option?  Also, are we able to see this list somewhere? (Maybe hidden n-levels deep in Google Account information?)  Reason I ask is I've had the unfortunate experience of my SD Card dying on me, put in a temporary SD Card and allowed Google to do the auto-restore.  Some things that were restored:   Saved wireless networks Background Some apps - strangely enough only a subset of my apps were restored (some with data, some without). All previous apps were installed via Android Market.   Then finally got my new SD Card, put that in and the following were restored   Saved wireless networks Some apps - again, same problem... only a subset (different subset, even fewer apps). This time no data seemed to have been restored either.   I think it would be very helpful to be able to view/manage a list of what is backed up, and thus would be restored (but I have yet to find this list... if it even exists).
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I know that on a rooted phone, it's reasonably normal to create a small ext4 partition for App2SD to use, but I'm not asking about that case:  I have a non-rooted HTC Desire running Froyo, and I'd like to format the whole of my SD card as ext4 instead of FAT.  I'm aware that this will mean that Windows PCs won't be able to use the card, but all my PCs run Linux so they should be fine.  Will the phone be able to access and use the card in this case?
32245
How to disable system apps without root?  My phone model is vivo x5 max+ and android 4.4.4  I have tried Debloater but it failed to connect (I am sure I've allowed USB debugging).
50022
I have a rooted OnePlus One running LineageOS 15.1 (Oreo 8.1).  I am trying to adjust some file permissions/ownerships on the emulated sdcard partition. The partition seems to be mounted as an sdcardfs:   A0001:/ # mount | grep /storage/emulated                                                                                                                                                            /data/media on /storage/emulated type sdcardfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,noatime,fsuid=1023,fsgid=1023,gid=1015,multiuser,mask=6,derive_gid)   I'm not sure what that means. Some people suggest that Android used to use mount then switched to fuse and now with Oero uses sdcardfs.  I'm not sure if that makes any sense, but I'm a bit scared that something like mount -o remount, rw /mnt/sdcard/ (which apparently is what you had to do in the past to be able to set file permissions on the emulated sdcard partition).  Short demonstration showing that file permissions won't be applied:  A0001:/ $ su A0001:/ # ls -la /storage/emulated                                                                                                                                                                  total 12 drwx--x--x  4 root sdcard_rw 4096 2018-07-24 17:44 . drwxr-xr-x  4 root root        80 2018-07-24 17:21 .. drwxrwx--x 14 root sdcard_rw 4096 2018-07-24 17:20 0 drwxrwx--x  2 root sdcard_rw 4096 1970-01-01 01:12 obb A0001:/ # touch /storage/emulated/a A0001:/ # ls -la /storage/emulated/a -rw------- 1 root sdcard_rw 0 2018-07-24 17:44 /storage/emulated/a A0001:/ # chmod 777 /storage/emulated/a A0001:/ # ls -la /storage/emulated/a                                                                                                                                                                -rw------- 1 root sdcard_rw 0 2018-07-24 17:44 /storage/emulated/a   (Note: the same happens if I use /storage/emulated/0 instead of /storage/emulated)  My question is: What do I have to run in order to be able to change the file permissions and file ownerships on this weird sdcardfs partition.
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I have an Android 9 tablet, rooted by way of Magisk. It has an external SD card mounted as sdfat on /mnt/media_rw/1234-5678 which is mounted on four other mount points, all as type sdcardfs, with some variation in owner and group.  From a terminal window I type ls -al /storage/1234-5678. Lots of files and directories are shown with one error message:  ls: permission denied: .android_secure   I try as root. I get the same result. Using /mnt/media_rw/1234-5678 and root, I can see the entry for .android_secure. I'm told that .android_secure itself is empty.   The external SD card is FAT32.  Anything on it has the same set of permissions.  How is .android_secure different from everything else on the card? Even if .android_secure has different permissions from the other files in the directory, why is that stopping me from displaying the directory entry? I become root and I still can't even display the directory entry for .android_secure. How can that be?   I tried stat. I tried lsattr. Still: permission denied.  I have read  but it doesn't answer my questions:   If I have the permissions needed to list some directory entries, how am I being forbidden to list a specific entry in that directory? How is it ever possible to deny root the ability to list a directory entry?  (And then change the protections on that entry.)   I can accept that the magic filesystem and/or SELinux makes it possible to have different protections on one file.  I just can't understand root being unable to even see what those different protections are.
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I'm about to flash a custom recovery, but I'm not sure if my bootloader is unlocked or not (phone is rooted, but I did it a while ago, so I can't remember the process I went with), and I don't want to do anything that might risk losing all my current data. Can I simply run fastboot flash recovery [recovery image], and if it doesn't work, take that to mean my bootloader is locked? Are there any negative consequences to attempting this with a locked bootloader?
35473
I factory reset my rooted Android M phone but now I realize that there was a file in the /data directory which I need.  Is it possible to create an image (.img or something similar) of the /data partition so that I could run some recovery software for ext4 on that image? I have a little knowledge about ADB.
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I've always had a LOST.DIR folder on my external SD card, which until now has been empty.  Today my phone complained that my SD card was damaged and wouldn't mount it, so I pulled it out and looked at it on my computer.  There's now a 70237 file inside LOST.DIR which is 128 MB.  It starts with something like "&euml;&lt;MSWIN4.1", seemingly to indicate that it's a dump of a  (which makes no sense).  What did Android dump here and and why?  (I think I may have disconnected my phone from my PC yesterday without ejecting the drives first, so that might be the "why", though it was from Windows XP and not Windows 98.)  Is there a simple way to recover the information in this file?
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According to ,      /data ... Wiping this partition essentially performs a factory reset on your device, restoring it to the way it was when you first booted it, or the way it was after the last official or custom ROM installation. When you perform a wipe data/factory reset from recovery, it is this partition that you are wiping.   What about /boot, /system, and /recovery, and /cache?    If Factory Reset wipes only /data, then I wish it were called something else, because if you've rooted your phone, it will still be left with whatever custom ROM you flashed even after a Factory Reset.    On the other hand, if Factory Reset does indeed wipe /boot, /system, and /recovery as well, especially /boot, what does it restore those from?  Do all phones come with stock images in a real internal ROM somewhere that it can re-flash those images from?    I can somehow imagine manufacturers not wanting be burdened with the extra cost that such a spec for hardware-recoverable images might have cost them, so it got left out of the standard and left out of most phones, which is why it's so easy to brick them.  So, instead, they give you the option to wipe /data and /cache only, and call that a "Factory Reset" because you're not supposed to be foolish enough to root your phone in the first place according to their way of thinking.  Since rooting my Android and reading hundreds of posts, I've found that many of the terms I learned and accepted as a Computer Science grad student in the 80's don't quite mean the same thing anymore so I have to verify what everything really means before I do something.    Comments to  answer the first part of my question.  But they don't really answer the second part of my question which is really a complaint:  Why call it "Factory Reset" if it doesn't really restore your phone to it's stock factory state?    At this point, the question is merely rhetorical.  I think I already answered this in my question, unless someone can correct me.
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One of the main advantage of rooting is removing bloatware [I guess]. Is removing unwanted brand-based or operator-based app any different from disabling it from All Application in Settings? I don't find any improvement in memory too since these apps were pre-loaded in OS and you can't use those space any way.
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For an un-rooted device, almost all articles/forum posts I've read say that in order to flash a custom ROM you first need to flash (or boot) a custom recovery image like TWRP.   I'm not sure I understand why. If the bootloader is unlocked shouldn't it be possible to manually flash images that make up the custom ROM to the required partitions with fastboot flash &lt;partition&gt; [ &lt;xxxx.img&gt; ], and leave the stock recovery untouched.  I realize that this may be difficult and that there is no benefit in doing it this way, but I'm curious to know whether or not it is possible, and if not, why?