Water Damaged Phone Data Recovery
A phone that went in the toilet, pool, sink, or ocean is not the same thing as lost photos. The flash memory that holds your pictures, messages, and contacts almost always survives the water. What gets damaged is the circuitry around it. Our board level lab works on exactly this kind of water damaged phone, and most of the time the data is still sitting there waiting to be read.
Free diagnostics · No recovery, no fee · Nationwide mail in
Symptoms you might be seeing
If any of this sounds familiar, power the device down and leave it off.
Dropped in water and now completely dead, with no power and no charging light
Powers on but freezes on the Apple or Android logo, or reboots in a loop
Screen lights up but stays black, looks garbled, or shows only backlight
Gets hot near the charging port, or drains the moment you plug it in
Worked fine at first, then died hours or days later as corrosion spread
What NOT to do right now
Stop trying to power it on or charge it. Applied voltage drives corrosion and can short the circuitry that supports the memory chip
Skip the rice. It does nothing for corrosion that is already happening inside, and it leaves dust and starch in the ports
Don't shake it, blow dry it, or bake it. Heat and moving liquid just spread the contamination across the board
Don't plug it into a computer or charger to test it. That is the most common way a recoverable phone turns into a dead one
Don't let a local shop dry it out and see if it boots. Repeated power attempts are what cause permanent loss
Why it happens
What is actually going on inside the device.
Liquid by itself rarely erases anything. The real damage is corrosion and electrical shorting on the logic board. Water, and especially salt water, pool water, or anything sugary, leaves a conductive residue that bridges tiny pads and eats through traces.
That can kill the power management IC, the charging circuit, or the rails that feed the processor and memory. It also explains why a phone can look fine for a while and then die days later, because corrosion keeps spreading after the water is long gone. The flash NAND chip that actually stores your photos and messages is usually intact.
The problem is that the board around it can no longer power up or boot, so nothing can read it.
How ChipWorx recovers it
Lab work, done in house, on the failing hardware itself.
We open the device in our lab and clean the logic board under a microscope to stop the corrosion that is still active. From there we diagnose which components and power rails failed. A lot of phones come back to life with board level microsoldering, which means replacing a damaged power management or charging IC, repairing burned traces, or rebuilding a shorted rail, just long enough to image the data off the original chip.
In the most extreme cases, where the board is too far gone to revive, we go to the chip itself: we remove the NAND memory and, on iPhones, the paired processor (the CPU and NAND are cryptographically tied), move them onto donor hardware, and read your photos, messages, and contacts directly. That last step is a fallback, not the usual path. Diagnostics are free and it is no recovery, no fee.
You get a clear quote and timeframe after we have actually looked at your specific phone.
Frequently asked questions
Straight answers about cost, turnaround, and mail in.
My phone still turned on after it got wet. Is my data safe now?
Not necessarily. Corrosion keeps spreading inside after the water is gone, which is why a lot of phones run for hours or days and then quit. Power it off, stop charging it, and let us image the data before the board fails for good.
I already tried rice and charged it for a day. Did I ruin my chances?
Probably not. Rice is useless but mostly harmless. The charging attempts were the bigger risk. Even phones that have been powered on over and over can often be recovered at the board or chip level. Send it in and the free diagnostic will tell you where it stands.
It was salt water, pool water, or soda. Does that change anything?
Those are more corrosive and more conductive than fresh water, so they tend to chew through the logic board faster. It does not change how we work. We clean the board under a microscope, repair or bypass the damaged circuitry, and only as a last resort move the memory chip to donor hardware to read your data directly.
Your data is worth a look. Let’s recover it.
Free diagnostics, no recovery no fee. Mail it in from anywhere in the US.
Recovery outcomes vary with the type and severity of the damage, and we cannot guarantee successful recovery in every case. Work on an already failing device carries some risk of further damage. You always get an honest assessment and a quote before any work begins.
Other recoveries we handle: