My phone screen went black and I can reboot to a certain screen, then goes black again.

[torilyn79]

I have a 1 month old Straight Talk, Samsung Galaxy S7. The screen suddenly went black. I can reboot it by holding the power button and volume down button. It then goes to Samsung logo, blue TracFone Wireless screen, and enter 4 digit pin screen. I then enter the pin and the little unlocked lock icon comes on with the circle going around the lock several times, and then the screen goes black again. I have tried many different combinations of pressing the up, down, home and power buttons. I am also trying to wipe the cache partition without success, hoping that will eliminate the problem. My main concern is getting the photos out of a private folder. Any ideas on what to do or try next? Thanks!

 

[Rukbat]

Sorry, but the photos are probably already gone, along with Android, all your apps, all your documents, etc. About the best you can do is try the Home+Volume Up+Power buttons, to see if you can get into download mode. (If you can, you'll be given the choice of Volume Up to go into download mode or Volume Down to continue to Android. Choose Volume Up. If it shows the "do not turn off your phone" message, turn the phone off. Go to [Samsung] How to flash Stock ROM via ODIN to learn how to flash the stock ROM, find it (the link is in the article, as is the link to Odin, which you'll need [and you'll need a PC or laptop]), download it and Odin, and follow the steps in the article. If there's no hardware damage to the phone (bad ROM, bad RAM, etc.), you should be able to flash the firmware and get the use of your phone back.

IF all your contacts were entered as Google contacts, they'll sync up to the phone, otherwise you'll have to enter them all again by hand (and please enter them as Google contacts this time - for the obvious reason - the above - and don't worry about someone at Google "getting" them - no one of the relatively few people at Google who can get the data in your account will, and those who would can't - Google is serious about security). You'll lose everything else - pictures, videos, music, apps that you installed, etc. (Unless you back up your apps and pictures, in which case, they'll sync to the phone also.)

And this is a very good reason to back up everything to your Drive account, Mega or some other cloud account (or two cloud accounts) and to your PC or laptop. Once lost is forever lost m- unless it's backed up.

 

[TwitchyPuppy]

When the screen goes black, does your phone stay on?

If so, you can connect it to a computer to recover your stuff.