Recovering deleted SMS from my Nokia E63, Symbian S60 3rd mobile

So i ran into this problem - i accidentally deleted one unread message that looked important, from my inbox, in my Nokia E63, running on Symbian S60 3rd.

The recovery was simple, but tough to determine initially. I had to first make a call to customer care, see if they keep a record of the messages sent and received. But there wasn't any such thing.

So i resorted to crude hackery - my methods that after a little brainstorming for a few seconds gave me the solution - recovery through laptop.

As simple as it sounds, it is infact as simple to perform.

Provided, you have everything mentioned in the required section below:

Requirements:
Your SMSs setting: Pick your memory card to save your inbox messages (E or D drive probably)
I don't know if you by plugging in your mobile in USB mode to your PC or laptop will grant you access to the C drive of your mobile. If it does, then its good.

But just as a precaution, if your SMS settings are such that inbox or all other saved messages are saved on the external memory card, then it will be easier to retrieve the deleted content.

On my mobile, a Nokia E63, i had set the SMSs to be saved to my memory card, ie., E:\

Required software:
Recuva - latest version if possible
Download here: Recuva - free recovery tool
Wordpad/Notepad - should be already there on your Windows.

Steps:

A. Make sure when you accidentally deleted your message or messages, you go into offline mode. Because chances are, if your new messages arrive, your deleted messages will be overwritten by them. And your deleted messages are basically files with data which can't be referenced ordinarily by the operating system's file system.

Now, having done that - going in offline mode, its safe to assume that your overwritten messages will not be overwritten. Basically, don't do anything that might overwrite the messages - browsing the internet, or taking a new photo, recording audio, etc.

B. Connect your mobile to your desktop/laptop, in 'Mass Storage' mode. That's one of the connection-mode options i get for my Symbian S60 3rd mobile Nokia E63, when i connect it to my laptop using its micro-usb cable supplied with the device.

C. After choosing a 'Mass Storage' mode of connection, goto  MyComputers on your computer. There you will see the internal phone memory and memory card of your mobile listed as external mass storage media, just like when you insert pendrives.

Now in my case, the folder which contained the deleted message was somewhat like this, when exploring from my computer:
G:\private\1000484b\Mail2

But you don't have to worry about exploring so many folders. All you have to do is, start Recuva, then do the following:
1. Press Next when the Recuva Wizard opens up.
2. File Type dialog - select Others
3. File Location - select the memory card as shown in your computer. In my case, it was G:\
But be careful to select the drive in which your SMSs are stored according to your phone's settings.
If your messages were stored on phone's internal memory, then you should select the drive that represents your phone's internal memory. Say if after connecting your phone to your computer, you get removable drives appearing in My Computers - G and H, then G is probably the removable drive that corresponds to your phone's internal memory, aka C:\ on your phone, and H corresponds to your phone's external memory card, aka E:\ or on your phone.

4. After specifying the location for files to be dug out from, let it scan - this will take a couple of minutes, depending on how big that drive you are scanning is. My external memory card is of 4GB, so it took nearly 6-7 minutes to scan whole of it.

5. It will display results then. Green dotted records are the ones that are not overwritten and hence can be recovered fully. Orange dotted records mean somewhat destroyed by overwriting, and red ones mean completely overwritten - recovering these is useless.

D. Now all you gotta do is, sort the results date wise, by date modified or date created etc.
E. Pick the latest green dotted record - if its name is like 100cdb or something like that, then that's probably the message you need to recover. Because it was the last thing deleted off the filesystem of your phone.

Right click on it, click on recover, and select a location on your computer on which to store the recovered file.

F. After the recovery is made, you can easily open the recovered file, opening it in WordPad or Notepad, doesn't matter which, and view its contents.

In my case, the recoverd message appeared like this:


h< h<    KŽ p    : c       :    f      %: ¥ Please forward this touching YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY"!! :) )4 M         ƒÕ @   ut  \ ’-—á  ‘4+91xxxxxxxxxxd‘4+91xxxxxxxxxx  €„+E—á       @                                              



Y censored the part of the message, and x the number from which i received it. For privacy purpose.


By the way, this method doesn't just apply to
mobile - having a symbian one.
OS - having windows
connection of phone to computer - via usb.
deleted messages - it can be anything on your mobile.

All that matters is:
connecting mobile to pc
having a recovery software (like recuva) on your pc/mac/linux or *nix box
running the recovery software on the drives of the mobile appearing as removable external drives in your system.
selecting the latest deleted file, and recovering it.

Just always make sure, to have your mobile save all kinds of messages - incoming or outgoing, on your memory card, for convenience in later retrieval of deleted messages.

I hope you liked this article, and this helped you.