Sunday, March 11, 2012

How to Recover IMEI in your Samsung Galaxy S2 Android Phone

There has been many instances where the users of Android mobile device users lose their IMEI numbers and which is indeed a cause of concern as re implanting the IMEI is not an easy job and it’s not recommended as well. The device which we will be talking about on how to recover the IMEI is the Samsung Galaxy S2 smartphone. The recovery of the IMEI is very important as without the IMEI some of the network operators doesnt allow the latching of the network which is very painful at times. The loss of IMEI generally happens in the process of custom ROM firmware update.
Note: As of now the below mentioned tutorial should only be applied to the devices with the model number as Samsung Galaxy S2 but as in when this procedure of backing up the IMEI comes to other devices, we will cover the same here.
Before we proceed to the actual instructions, lets know on what are the quick pre requisites you need to fulfill which are mentioned below.
Quick Pre Requisites:
  • Galaxy S2 should be rooted and should not be a Network Locked Device (Unlocked device will do),
  • Root Explorer should be installed in your phone so that you can then copy the files from / to EFS Folder present in your phone.
  • Terminal Emulator app should be installed in your Galaxy S2.
Procedure to Recover IMEI of Samsung Galaxy S2 Android Phone:
  • Open the “Root Explorer” application in your phone and backup the folder which is named as “EFS” to your SD card and another copy you can store it in your computer.
  • Now after ensuring that you have backed up the EFS Folder, delete the “EFS” folder from the root of your phone using the Root explorer.
  • Now, reset the phone and then go to the root via Root explorer and you will see that the EFS Folder still exists. This EFS folder is the new one and not the old one which is automatically generated by the Android OS.
  • In the EFS Folder, delete the file “nv_data.bin”, “nv_data.bin.md5″.
  • Go to the EFS Folder which you have backed up in your device’s SD Card, copy the “IMEI” folder to the EFS Folder in your phone and copy the “.nv_data” file in the EFS Folder at the root of the phone using the root explorer
  • Now, make another copy of “.nv_data” file in the EFS folder of your phone, so by now you will have the two copies of “.nv_data” in the EFS Folder
  • Now, rename one of the”.nv_data.bin” to “nv_data.bin” and another one to the “nv_data.bin.bak”
  • Up next in your PC, open the command prompt at the ADB tool path  or run the terminal in your phone to enter the below mentioned commands.
adb shell ( use this command of you use ADB, if you’re using terminal, skip this line )
su ( ALLOW THE MESSAGE CAME AT YOUR PHONE’s DISPLAY BY SUPERUSER PROGRAM )
chown 1001:radio /efs/nv_data.bin
  • Finally reset the phone and there you go, the original IMEI has been restored which you can check by dialing *#06#
Congratulations, you have now successfully recovered your IMEI in your Samsung Galaxy S2. Do let us know in the comments section just in case if you face any issues as we will try our level best to address the same.

3 comments:

  1. when i tried to delet efs folder. its give me error that this is system folder, cant deleted

    ReplyDelete
  2. To anyone who might be interested, I have fixed the problem.

    i hv tried evrything but none is useful as below.
    its to simple. no more headache at all

    I had to root the phone, and install Busybox. Then I installed an app called GSII_Repair. In the app, theres an option to ‘Mount EFS on RW’. I did this, and after rebooting, it works! Back on the network, and now the IMEI number can be viewed again!

    ReplyDelete
  3. To anyone who might be interested, I have fixed the problem.

    i hv tried evrything but none is useful as below.
    its to simple. no more headache at all

    I had to root the phone, and install Busybox. Then I installed an app called GSII_Repair. In the app, theres an option to ‘Mount EFS on RW’. I did this, and after rebooting, it works! Back on the network, and now the IMEI number can be viewed again!

    ReplyDelete