iPhone Data Recovery

[Righteous]

Having to recover data off of hardware so integrated, embedded and frankly, alien is proving to be a great struggle. The problem: My buddy's brother washed his jeans and mistakenly left his iPhone in the pocket. My buddy does exactly the wrong thing and pries it open looking for the reason for it not powering on. Being such fragile hardware, ribbons sheared and tore when he opened it making many features impossible to repair.
He brought it to me in two pieces. The reason this is such a critical repair is because there is legal evidence that needs to be brought before a court in about a month.
So I fiddled with it and tried to get the ribbons to touch and finally got the computer to recognize the phone when I propped it open.
http://www.wabuf.com/MISCMEDIA/OTHERIMAGES/iPhoneRepair.jpg
As you can see, I gained access to some of the files, but not all. The camera folder in the picture above is 4 gigabytes, but the iPhone's capacity is 8 gigabytes (All I found was a DCIM folder with pictures). Plus, the most important information is in text-message form. So I found this program that claims to backup / recover everything (including text-messages) to your hard drive [ here (http://supercrazyawesome.com/) ]. The down side to this program is that it runs exclusively on Apples.<br />Enter Chris...<br /><br /><br />

[The Dan Sandwich]

I am not Chris, but I do have a possible solution: I own an iPod (no the same, but I'm sure some of it is similar), and I know you can access all of the information off of it, including stuff you're not supposed to be able to access (i.e. songs, videos) by enabling the option to view hidden folders in Windows. I'm sure you've probably already done this, but if you haven't, it might help.

[Righteous]

Yeah, I have every folder on 7 default to that option. Thanks for the suggestion, though. Like I said before, the only part I'm able to view is 4 gigabytes and the iPhone is 8 gigabytes. So, I'm definitely missing something here; Something Apple does a very good job of hiding.
Ooh! That just made me think of something, I'll try plugging it in after I boot into Ubuntu. Ubuntu sees everything on my iPod by default, so it should reflect the similarities!

[Righteous]

UPDATE: We got it fixed yesterday thanks to Chris and his Macbook! The program I downloaded ended up being a trial version. So we got the full-version. The program worked like a charm and retrieved all 1,300 of my buddy's, brother's text messages.

Thanks for the help!

[Twilight]

I am amazed how was it possible to recover the files after the device is soaked.