Data Recovery - Is the internal sd-card part of /data (gs4)? On every other phone I have owned (with CWM recovery) when I did a factory reset, it left my (internal) SD card contents intact.  I wasn't thinking and did a factory reset and deleted everything.

As you all know reformatting a hard drive doesn't actually wipe the drive.  From the looks of things the internal sd card is part of /data.  So I took data's block device and did the following from ADB shell

I'm not looking up the exact paths but I believe I determined the block device to use by looking at "busybox df -h"s output

dd if=/dev/*--PATH-TO-mmblk-WHICH-DATA-IS-ON/ of=/cache/img1.img bs=1M count=1024
tar cvzf /cache/img1.tar.gz /cache/img1.img
*Copy img*.tar.gz to network share on my comp with ES file explorer
rm -f /cache/img*

dd if=/dev/*--PATH-TO-mmblk-WHICH-DATA-IS-ON/ of=/cache/img2.img bs=1M count=1024 offset=1024
tar cvzf /cache/img2.tar.gz /cache/img1.img
*Copy img*.tar.gz to network share on my comp with ES file explorer
rm -f /cache/img*


dd if=/dev/*--PATH-TO-mmblk-WHICH-DATA-IS-ON/ of=/cache/img3.img bs=1M count=1024 offset=2048
tar cvzf /cache/img3.tar.gz /cache/img1.img
*Copy img*.tar.gz to network share on my comp with ES file explorer
rm -f /cache/img*
,
.
.


I did this with all 10 or so GB of /data/ (forget actual size, but it's a 16GB model).  I then opened these up in a hex editor and searched for known strings in my saved data (contents of messages from SMS backup &amp; restore).  I was unable to find my data.  As far as texts are concerned I was able to find raw texts on my current device (not before I reset),

My question is, is the internal sd card on a different partiton than /data/?
It appears that the internal SD card is on the same partition as /data (I verified with my GT-I9500 at XXUEMJ9 - 4.3, output below):

root@ja3g:/storage/emulated/legacy # df                                        
Filesystem               Size     Used     Free   Blksize
/dev                   931.8M    76.0K   931.8M   4096
/mnt/secure            931.8M     0.0K   931.8M   4096
/mnt/asec              931.8M     0.0K   931.8M   4096
/mnt/obb               931.8M     0.0K   931.8M   4096
/system                  2.7G     2.1G   588.6M   4096
/efs                    19.7M     9.2M    10.5M   4096
/cache                   2.0G    32.6M     1.9G   4096
/data                    8.8G     8.3G   540.4M   4096
/persdata/absolute      11.8M     4.2M     7.6M   4096
/mnt/shell/emulated      8.8G     8.3G   520.4M   4096
/mnt/shell/container     8.8G     8.3G   520.4M   4096
/mnt/ntfs              931.8M     0.0K   931.8M   4096
/storage/emulated      931.8M     0.0K   931.8M   4096
/storage/extSdCard      14.8G    10.4G     4.4G   8192
/storage/emulated/0      8.8G     8.3G   520.4M   4096
/storage/emulated/0/Android/obb     8.8G     8.3G   520.4M   4096
/storage/emulated/legacy     8.8G     8.3G   520.4M   4096
/storage/emulated/legacy/Android/obb     8.8G     8.3G   520.4M   4096


Some other manufacturers have different implementations of the layout; in fact, this decision was the largest possible reason why the Mass Storage option disappeared and MTP had to be used - because /data used ext4 which most Windows PCs can't recognize.

Some CWM versions do not perform a format on /data when you request for a factory reset - that is because they are either:


Running on a pre-3.0 version of Android that uses the older implementation
Using a manufacturer-defined custom layout
Running custom "Factory Reset" code that does only rm -rf on the folders


As to why the plaintext cannot be found, I'm not entirely sure - but I thought it might have to do with the formatting being done with secure erase (MMC_CAP_ERASE). 

More information can be found here: http://teamw.in/DataMedia

And in the 4.2 source code itself: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/docs/source.android.com/+/android-4.2.1_r1/src/tech/storage/index.md