[Joey Hill4]

My phone froze up a bit ago and I was told here that it was most likely the motherboard failing. I had a bunch of original songs recorded on there that I would really like to have back. is there any hope?

[B. Diddy]

Any chance those songs were saved to an SD card in the phone rather than Internal Storage? If it was Internal Storage, then all you can do is to bring it to a data recovery specialist and hope they can retrieve the data. They're usually not cheap either -- it might cost a few hundred dollars, without a guarantee that they'll get everything.

[Rukbat]

At least a few hundred - maybe add a digit.

[B. Diddy]

At least a few hundred - maybe add a digit.

I've seen some places advertise $99 for data recovery, but I'm guessing there are a lot of conditions and clauses to that.

[Rukbat]

I wouldn't trust anyone to recover data from an SD card for $99, and I can do that myself. Unless Christophe comes out with an Android version of PhotoRec, it's not as trivial as replacing a motherboard (which costs a lot more than $99). And if a bad the SoC is the cause of the problem, there's nothing to recover - it's just a little piece of silicon in a larger piece of epoxy - nothing electronic left in it. But he'd still have to pay them for the labor to find out that the SoC was shot (which would be about $99).