iPhone Water Damage Data Recovery
A water-damaged iPhone 6S Plus comes in for data recovery, and the shields are already off. The technician checks the power rails against the schematic, scrapes corrosion off the board, replaces a chip, and gets the phone to boot to the passcode screen. No data comes off in the video, because there's no passcode.
Mapping the Damage
Water creates conductive paths between rails and ground. So the technician checks the rails near the corroded area for shorts, taking diode mode readings to ground on their bypass capacitors.
As the video puts it, ultrasonic cleaning with the shields still on doesn't reach the corrosion underneath. Shields off first, clean second.
Corrosion Cleanup and Chip Replacement
In this case, a chip in the corroded area had to come off. The technician desolders it with hot air, then scrapes the corrosion off its pads under a microscope. This is slow, precise work. Too much pressure lifts pads off the board; too little leaves corrosion that keeps spreading.
Once the pads are clean, a new chip goes on.
Boot to Passcode, Extract Data
The phone does not need to work perfectly. Touch ID can be dead, the display can have artifacts, the speaker can be silent. All that matters is reaching the passcode screen. The NAND in an iPhone holds nothing but encrypted data, and only the phone's own processor can decrypt it, using keys fused into its hardware. Once the owner enters the passcode, we copy the photos, messages, and files off the phone. Without the passcode, the data stays locked permanently.
Dropped Your iPhone in Water?
Turn it off. Do not put it in rice. Send it to us while the corrosion is still manageable. We do the same board-level water damage recovery shown in this video, and if we cannot get your data back, you do not pay.