Creating a .dd image of a Galaxy S3 without rooting the phone I'm working for my university's CS Department, and we've got a Digital Forensics project which requires us to create a one-to-one .dd image of a T-Mobile Galaxy S3 (Jellybean 4.1), so that we can recover some deleted data. I've done some Googling, and called Samsung, but I haven't been able to find any way to create an uncompressed image without rooting, and we can't root the phone without dealing with some legal ramifications.

Does anyone know of a program that can get the image without rooting?
It's impossible to obtain block level access to a block device without root, since all of those files grant the write permission only to root. At least I have never seen it any other way and I doubt that the S3 is an exception here.

It's not because it's technically impossible, the default permissions simply forbid it. A this is done for a pretty good reason: It would be a major security issue if this was possible: The normal user could get a dump of all the filesystem data.