Hello everyone. I'm new here and I hope I can find assistance for the issue I am facing over here.
So, my mother has a Lumia 530 Dual SIM she bought sometime in 2015. After it was damaged by a family member of hers when she was vising them it was sent in for repairs but although they got the screen replaced just fine, the phone returned with plenty of problems it didn't have before and it never got fixed as she demanded. She ended up losing the money spent on these "repairs" because the people who worked on it vanished from the face of the Earth and her Lumia was left with lots of problems. The phone became unusable so she had no option but to put it away. About a year later (now) I decided to pick it up and see if maybe I could figure out what's wrong with it. From what she had described to me, a simple hard reset/format should solve the problems. Windows on it is quite bugged out, so I took it in and yes, it really is very messed up. Though a much more than what I was expecting.
Absolutely no applications will open. Tap on anything and it will simply "pretend" to open but instead it will flip right back to the menu screen. Camera won't open, OneDrive won't open, phone dial won't open, Backup won't open, Storage won't open, Email and Accounts won't open, image selection for setting wallpaper/lock screen image won't open, etc. About everything. And there are no errors being displayed. Everything also looks quite odd. Colors don't seem quite right as they should. So yeah, I figured that wipe it and do a fresh install should solve all of that and after a couple days researching about this phone's problems on the internet, it does seem that formatting should be the best (and maybe only) solution. But there is one major problem: Her files.
The phone is missing its SD card ever since it returned from repairs. The people who worked on it replaced the battery for a crappy-looking one that doesn't keep charge for more than a few hours, transferred all her stuff to the internal memory and took the SD card (she never realized that until recently) so everything's in the phone itself. I plugged it to two different computers and three different operating systems (Windows 7, 10 and Ubuntu) and in all of them the phone is recognized and mounted just fine, but though phone's storage displays as having data in it (it's actually full), when I enter in it to access its contents and copy her stuff over to my hard drive, it just won't show anything. It's completely blank! I tried using Windows' "Import Videos and Pictures" function but it just gives me an error either stating that the device has been disconnected or "Element not found". I also tried Windows Phone App For Desktop and not even that is able to "see" what's in the phone. I'd try a different USB cable but this very same cable I am using for it works perfectly fine with my Lumia 640 XL and Alcatel Pixi 3 so I am pretty sure the problem is not the USB cable or the ports in my computers. Also I don't have another cable to try, anyway.
The files she has in this phone are very important to her as she made it very clear to me (she actually sort of freaked out a bit when I mentioned I would format the phone to restore it to its factory settings), so backup them is a must before I can proceed with hard resetting it. I also tried backing up to OneDrive through the backup notification that popped up in the Notification Area but that only copies settings. I need to copy the files. And as I said before, the Backup function/app in the Settings menu also won't open, making it impossible for me to set the phone to backup photos to OneDrive instead of app and system settings as the notification does.
I recorded a short video showcasing the phone's behavior to better exemplify the issues I am facing.
I will really appreciate if anyone can shed any light on this dark mystery. Thank you for the attention!
So, my mother has a Lumia 530 Dual SIM she bought sometime in 2015. After it was damaged by a family member of hers when she was vising them it was sent in for repairs but although they got the screen replaced just fine, the phone returned with plenty of problems it didn't have before and it never got fixed as she demanded. She ended up losing the money spent on these "repairs" because the people who worked on it vanished from the face of the Earth and her Lumia was left with lots of problems. The phone became unusable so she had no option but to put it away. About a year later (now) I decided to pick it up and see if maybe I could figure out what's wrong with it. From what she had described to me, a simple hard reset/format should solve the problems. Windows on it is quite bugged out, so I took it in and yes, it really is very messed up. Though a much more than what I was expecting.
Absolutely no applications will open. Tap on anything and it will simply "pretend" to open but instead it will flip right back to the menu screen. Camera won't open, OneDrive won't open, phone dial won't open, Backup won't open, Storage won't open, Email and Accounts won't open, image selection for setting wallpaper/lock screen image won't open, etc. About everything. And there are no errors being displayed. Everything also looks quite odd. Colors don't seem quite right as they should. So yeah, I figured that wipe it and do a fresh install should solve all of that and after a couple days researching about this phone's problems on the internet, it does seem that formatting should be the best (and maybe only) solution. But there is one major problem: Her files.
The phone is missing its SD card ever since it returned from repairs. The people who worked on it replaced the battery for a crappy-looking one that doesn't keep charge for more than a few hours, transferred all her stuff to the internal memory and took the SD card (she never realized that until recently) so everything's in the phone itself. I plugged it to two different computers and three different operating systems (Windows 7, 10 and Ubuntu) and in all of them the phone is recognized and mounted just fine, but though phone's storage displays as having data in it (it's actually full), when I enter in it to access its contents and copy her stuff over to my hard drive, it just won't show anything. It's completely blank! I tried using Windows' "Import Videos and Pictures" function but it just gives me an error either stating that the device has been disconnected or "Element not found". I also tried Windows Phone App For Desktop and not even that is able to "see" what's in the phone. I'd try a different USB cable but this very same cable I am using for it works perfectly fine with my Lumia 640 XL and Alcatel Pixi 3 so I am pretty sure the problem is not the USB cable or the ports in my computers. Also I don't have another cable to try, anyway.
The files she has in this phone are very important to her as she made it very clear to me (she actually sort of freaked out a bit when I mentioned I would format the phone to restore it to its factory settings), so backup them is a must before I can proceed with hard resetting it. I also tried backing up to OneDrive through the backup notification that popped up in the Notification Area but that only copies settings. I need to copy the files. And as I said before, the Backup function/app in the Settings menu also won't open, making it impossible for me to set the phone to backup photos to OneDrive instead of app and system settings as the notification does.
I recorded a short video showcasing the phone's behavior to better exemplify the issues I am facing.
I will really appreciate if anyone can shed any light on this dark mystery. Thank you for the attention!