How to completely wipe an android phone through a PC?


Question

I dropped my smartphone and now the screen doesn't work, but the software functionality remains intact. I can receive calls and messages for instance, but I can't see a thing on the screen.



Having said that: Is there a way to completely wipe the phone without any interaction with the phone screen at all? (In a way that data recovering tools such as Recuva cannot recover the files)



The phone is rooted.

Its a Moto X1 (xt1058).

Developer mode is activated.

Not sure if USB debugging is activated. (I tried using Droid Explorer, but the phone isn't detected)


Answer

If you can boot your device in mode, you can use for this task (see our fastboot tag-wiki for details):



fastboot -w

# erase userdata and cache (and format if supported by partition type)
fastboot format cache # format cache and userdata
fastboot format userdata


This does not make it completely impossible to recover any data with forensic tools, but makes it sufficiently hard to not being worth the effort – unless data stored on the device is that valuable that one would invest some thousand dollars to get it.



Of course this requires the appropriate tools (and on Windows, also the drivers) to be installed on your computer.


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