I am pretty sure, I spent about 16 hours combined working on this Samsung S21 Plus.

It came to me for Data Recovery.

It started bootlooping out of nowhere & customer needed all their pics & vids.

I went through my normal BDS workflow to solve the common bootlooping problem, but this one was different. Nothing I did changed the behavior.

UFS reballed, no change
UFS health was checked and was good, so we proceed to work on it
Then did RAM reball, but no change.
Then CPU & RAM Reball (they're stacked on top of each other) and same results.

At this point, customer approved a CPU Swap and oh boy, was that fun.

First step was to do the full CPU/RAM/UFS swap onto my working donor to see if it boots and it was no power. After some troubleshooting & replacing RAM, it finally booted...

Turns out, this phone had no pin code, but because Samsung started pairing a small IC to the phone (staring on S21 series), so it needed the "pin code IC" to be swapped as well.

The problem is that the pin code IC is inside the sandwich, so I figured i'd to the swap to see if i can get it boot first, then deal with the sandwich issues/pin code IC.

So even though this phone has no pin code, it will still not let me access the user data. It was forever in the "The phone is starting...." screen & nothing would load.

I can browse the settings, but couldn't really do much. None of the menu options were opening.

So this tells me, the pin code IC is needed, even if the phone has no pin code.

That's when I proceeded to split the sandwich on both boards, so I could transplant the small pin code IC

But that's when I ran into a problem...

After much troubleshooting, I got it booting and user data finally loaded! But it was restarting & overheating. I tried different methods to cool it but it would not change anything.

I reballed the sandwich again & it stopped over heating, but still restarting.

Tried reballing CPU, RAM, UFS, pin code IC and sandwich, but same results.

Finally, I decided to try another donor board..

And that did it! It finally booted up and stayed on fine. It didn't overheat either.

Looking back to all the steps I took, I definitely learned a lot. I also feel that maybe i could have resolved this in the beginning with just a new RAM chip.

I recently had another S21 that was no power & detected in "QDLoader mode" that ended up just being a bad RAM chip.

So although I spent a ton of time on this one, I have learned from this whole experience & I'm confident I'll be able to quickly solve future Android data jobs, thanks to the time I invested in this one.

So if you need your data recovered, send me a PM for a quote. B2B discounted pricing is available 🔥