Troubleshooting - dead touchscreen

Roady · 20 May 2019 at 10:59

Hi all

Have a Samsung handset with a working screen, but dead touchscreen after a 'drop-into-water-incident'. User put it in a bag of rice for a few days in an airing cupboard. It's now powering on/charging/displaying ok, but the touchscreen seems totally dead. It had a screen swipe unlock set.

I've used a USB OTG and mouse to Unlock it - works great, but doesn't help me with the next problem - plugging it into PC to back it up. I can now obviously unlock it using the mouse, connect it to PC (Smart Switch) but as that's using the micro-usb port I have to have the mouse disconnected... So when I get the device authorisation (MTP) prompt I'm unable to clear. Any suggestions? I've not seen any USB OTG with 2 ports on them...

Have enabled Developer & USB debugging. Running Android 8.1.0. Quite a young J5 (2017), but one of the all enclosed/glued enclosures so cannot easily disassemble to reconnect the screen connections.

I'm easily fixing this by replacing the handset, then hopefully using Smart Switch from phone to phone. But was after an interim to back things up first.

ping8781 · 20 May 2019 at 12:14

Can you use VNC or similar to then control the phone remotely once unlocked and connected to Micro USB?

UnworthyBean · 20 May 2019 at 21:42

Either do as above or depending on how much data you have that needs backing up i'd just Dropbox / Google drive it.

Other option is transferring to a shared folder on PC

DELETED_83755 · 21 May 2019 at 03:14

Could try a usb hub that can attach to the OTG cable if you have one lying around ?

Roady · 21 May 2019 at 09:16

ping8781 said:
Can you use VNC or similar to then control the phone remotely once unlocked and connected to Micro USB?

That's an idea, but I've never used VNC to control a smartphone - so the question needs to be - do things like screen locks & 'security' type authorisations all work on VNC?

UnworthyBean said:
Either do as above or depending on how much data you have that needs backing up i'd just Dropbox / Google drive it.

Other option is transferring to a shared folder on PC

The MTP authorisation (or whatever the correct name is) is to access the phones storage over USB. Without clearing it I can't access it from PC.

I'd already gone through your first solution, just backed everything up to the google account that I could. Looks like you get 20gb for free anyway?! Nice!

teddy3578 said:
Could try a usb hub that can attach to the OTG cable if you have one lying around ?

That was my next thinking. To be fair I can 'fix' things by just using Smartswitch to transfer so this was more of an open ended kinda 'solution' to troubleshooting future problems - I was going to buy an OTG adaptor with a HDMI output so I could recover data from phones where people have smashed screens (I look after the 68 work mobiles here and they get abused). If I'm getting an OTG with that (only have a single USB port one) then I wanted 2 USB ports on it too but they don't seem to exist...!