[Galaxy Grand Prime Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] Your-Mum:
Hello, ladies and lads!

Here's a short version of where I'm at: after installing Wondershare' s dr.phone Recovery on my mom's PC and using it on her phone:

its screen won't respond to touch (can't enter SIM card's PIN nor open screen lock)

the On/Off button won't turn off the phone on long press (maybe due to screen lock)

on restart there's a yellow text that reads "Set Warranty Bit : kernel"

the physical buttons still work

I can see the phone's files and folders only through PC's command prompt, using ADB ('This PC\Galaxy Grand Prime' folder in Win Explorer says it's empty).

Ideally I want to keep her data (FB Messenger, Skype, Chrome, WiFi passwords, etc), and her phone to function again. What do you think I should do?

I think I need an advice and suggestions from someone more experienced than me - I don't even know trusted sites where to download the firmware roms from.

The phone's details are (I'm afraid you'll have to walk me through to get more details to this list, as I'm new to the forum):

Phone: Samsung Grand Prime

Model name: SM-G530FZ

Firmware version: G530FZXXS1BQC2 (Android 5.0.2 with Baltic bloatware, I guess)

Now in detail:

My knowledge and experience regarding the smartphone software & restoration is very basic (I've only restored the firmware to a LG-L70 once some years ago, and that's it).

Before the problem I lost some over 600 media files from that phone by Cutting and Pasting a folder from phone's internal SD to PC's disc. Now I learned never to Cut-Paste important or irreplaceable files. The files ended up on the phone, because a folder with over 800 files couldn't be uploaded to the Google Drive (the camera's folder had over 1k files in it, so I moved some of them to another folder, which the phone created on the internal partition rather than the SD Card, where the original folder was from).

Instead of using a trusted software, I foolishly Googled a photo recovery program for phones, using my mom's PC. A list of bogus recovery program sites appeared (had to look them up on her PC, as I found only legit, widely trusted programs now, using my laptop. Those darn Google's personalized search result algorithms!).

Before using the dr.fone Recovery software I synced most of the data to her account.

Used the "free" dr.fone Recovery software as per its site's instructions, the phone did a restart and the touchscreen went unresponsive to touch. Later the software showed the lost files it found, and offered to restore them for a sum. Naturally I declined.

The software said that to return the phone to normal I need to disconnect the USB cable. I did so, but the phone's screen remained unresponsive to touch, even after restart (long-press [Pow] + [Vol-]).

I tried connecting an USB mouse via the dongle, but the mouse cursor didn't appear (maybe this phone doesn't have this functionality).

Now, after using that FAIL-covery program, I was overly cautious not to make things even worse.

I wanted to make a copy of the phone's internal SD state (or is it called a phone's hard drive?), to get the media files from the clone and to have a backup of mom's files.

But I failed: I downloaded APK, ncat, KingoRoot and BusyBox. Tried to follow the steps in this video: youtu[dot]be/KKkvkCgMeMA. Got stuck at "busybox not found" at about 10:27 mark in that video ("dd if=/dev/block/mmcblk0" "busybox nc -l -p 8888"). Turns out you need to run some of the apps from that phone prior to that step, and I don't know any workarounds.

Then I remembered that the files were on the external SD in the first place. Well duh! I then connected the Micro SD card to PC's reader via a Micro SD adapter. To make a copy of the SD card's 1s & 0s, and to restore the media files from said copy I used ZAR (Zero Assumption Recovery) z-a-recovery[dot]com/. The backup creation (an .ISO file or some such) and media recovery are free of charge.

Now I only need to remove duplicates and blurry pics (I think I had a Moleskinsoft's Clone Remover from an old PC magazine's CD lying around somewhere for the latter). Oh, and I better not forget to run a malware scanner on her PC and remove the mr.fone installed services and folders from it. Went a bit off-topic here, sorry!

Last I pulled a wifi passwords file with "adb pull /data/misc/wifi/wpa_supplicant.conf" command as per instructions on this page: mashtips[dot]com/see-wifi-password-android/. I don't know whether putting the file back on that phone will do the trick or not.

That's pretty much all.

I hope the situation can be resolved and I appreciate your input! :fingers-crossed: Maybe someone has come across a similar post, has constructive commentary or knows something obvious that I haven't come up with? Thank you in advance!

Edit 30 Jan '19: Got the phone working. Accessed the phone with a Chrome browser extension (name here). All accounts except some mail account were gone. WiFi didn't work.

Found a stock ROM here: (address here).

Found the Odin3 tool here: (address here). It came with a different locale ROM.

Flashed the 1st ROM with Odin. The screen started to work.

Flashed the 1st ROM with Odin again. The WiFi started working.

I'll update this with links soon.