[Nexus S Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] litanyoffail:
Hello XDA-Developers. Long time lurker, first time poster. After watching the "Noob" video, I feel compelled to apologize in advance for needing to call on your greater experience and knowledge.

The specs (If there's anything left out that you might need, let me know. If I can get to it, I'll post it):

Model: Samsung/Google Nexus S GT-i9020A

Bootloader Ver: I9020XXKA3

Baseband Ver: I9020UCKD1

Carrier: Bootloader says ATT, my actual carrier is Telus.

ROM: Cyanogenmod 7.1 RC1 Experimental

Kernel: Netarchy's Nexus S CFS 1.3.6 Stable

CWM Ver: 3.0.2.4

The problem:

I've been running CM7 for the last couple of months (since I got the phone). I woke my phone, opened the Market, and it suddenly went into a boot loop; not from the beginning Google logo though, just the Nexus S boot screen, and very laggy. I let it try to boot for a while, and did a battery pull when it was (to my apparently idiotic mind) obviously not going to. Put the battery back in and it just sat there on the Google logo for a good half hour.

Here's where things get a little curious. I pulled the battery again, and PWR+VOL UP to get to the bootloader. Load up CWM, and lo and behold, I can't mount the internal SD or the DATA partition. Thus, I can't restore, can't flash anything new, and I've got a phone good for a whole lot of nothing.

What I've done so far:

I've spent the last 9 (yes, nine.) hours searching the internet with increasingly more vague and unrelated search terms. The best solution I've found so far: "Take out the SD card, pull everything off of it and format it. Put it back in to the phone, and presto!" A caveat that you all know: The Nexus S has no removable SD card.

One of the first things I tried, having only fastboot at my disposal, has turned out to be the worst thing I could have possibly done. I tried locking then unlocking the bootloader again, to wipe everything and start from an empty phone. Well, the boot loader won't unlock again. Fastboot sees my Nexus S, fastboot oem unlock yields the familiar "Unlock Bootloader?" screen, and when I select Yes.... Nothing happens. The phone stops responding, the command prompt sits there with "c:\fastboot-path>fastboot oem unlock ..."

Now, the solution to this, according to some, is to wait long enough and do a battery pull to finish unlocking the bootloader. This has yielded no results. Further research indicates that the internal storage may have some kind of hardware problem, a known issue with the Nexus S. Being forced to look at sending the phone in for repairs, I've become a little desperate. I need to removed the CWM somehow. I've got the stock recovery.img, but I'm stuck with a locked bootloader. I did a lot of research into using ODIN to recover the phone back to stock, but I can't get the phone into Download Mode. Using the VOL UP+DOWN then plugging it into USB throws me directly into the screen asking me to unlock my bootloader... except there's no way to say yes or no.

At this point, I'm seriously panicking. This is my only phone, and I'm really quite broke. I can't afford to pay for repairs if they find the phone is out of their ridiculously strict warranty. I can't afford to be without a way to get a hold of me when I'm not standing next to my fiancée or staring at my GMail inbox... Quite literally, my job depends on this phone.

Help me XDA-Developers... You're my only hope.