So, my very old phone died last year. Not until today I had the time to desolder the NAND-chip to check it. The culprit was a read/write error, causing the phone lock itself when it tried to boot. I have salvaged all my files now. For SMS/MMS, I use the app "SMS Backup & Restore" but this requires a working SMS-database so I cannot pull the info out of the .db-file (and the attached MMS-files). So I bought an exact same phone for peanuts and installed the exact same firmware on it, copied /data/data/com.android.provider.telephony/* from the dead to the new one and expected this to work, so I could run the SMS Backup-app again.

Alas, it does not. Everytime I boot the new phone now I get the message as seen on the photo. Somehow the old database make the new phone go havoc but I don't know why. Everything is exacly the same so I don't know why it would complain.

So, anyway: does anyone know how I can put back the mmssms.db into /data/data/com.android.providers.telephony/ so I can make a clean backup of everything?

I don't think you can put the database back onto the new phone by just copying it. I am sure it is tied to the phone with metadata of some kind which probably prevents it from booting. You can parse the database with a tool and recover the data to an XLS or CSV file and possibly import it that way. The database is more than likely SQL Lite.

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HDD, SSD, Flash and RAID Data Recovery

I managed to solve it. Long story shot: you can put the db-file there and it will fetch everything from it.

However, in my case, the db-file contained errors (due to the error corruption, I assume). That's why everything went nuts. I managed to run an adb-shell, open the db in sqlite, use ".dump" and then ".read" it back. That way, all the dead records went away, and the phone could import the db-file without any hassle.

Unfortunately I lost the latest 300 SMS due to the corruption, but I can live with that. Atleast I learned something new.

Well done. Thanks for sharing.

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HDD, SSD, Flash and RAID Data Recovery