[Droid Incredible General] DefectiveRobot:
The Gist:

After much searching and reading and poking I found a way to pull my Titanium Backup data out after my Incredible started boot looping. This might be a no-brainer for most of you, but my linux skills are noob at best. Running ADB while in recovery did not show any /mnt/emmc or path to the internal storage. Relevant XDA threads pointed to the vold.fstab file for hints at where the internal storage lay, but repeating those commands in adb resulted only in errors:

# Mounts the first usable partition of the specified device
dev_mount sdcard /mnt/sdcard auto /devices/platform/goldfish_mmc.0 /devices/platform/msm_sdcc.2/mmc_host/mmc1
dev_mount emmc /mnt/emmc 3 /devices/platform/msm_sdcc.3/mmc_host/mmc2

And poking around, I could not find any /devices/platform folder. But the "mmc" gave me a hint that it might be related to the things I found in /dev/block:

# ls
ls
loop0 loop4 mmcblk0 mmcblk1 mtdblock2 mtdblock6
loop1 loop5 mmcblk0p1 mmcblk1p1 mtdblock3 platform
loop2 loop6 mmcblk0p2 mtdblock0 mtdblock4 vold
loop3 loop7 mmcblk0p3 mtdblock1 mtdblock5
#

Some of these I saw were being used by the data, cache, and system partitions. So, I tried mounting emmc to some of the others, but kept getting "file does not exist", and "block device required" errors. But, with XDA, google, and persistance, I hit on the right combination. I unmounted the sdcard, and remounted that existing label to point to the partition where emmc should have been:

# umount sdcard

# mount -r -t vfat /dev/block/mmcblk0p3 sdcard

after that, I could see all my lost emmc files, and immediately pulled them through ADB.

The Phone:

Stock AMOLED Incredible, running Verizon OTA Froyo. Held off OTA Gingerbread until I had a chance to root it with unrevoked. I only made one small change to build.prop to prevent future OTA updates. I decided to keep Froyo running and used Titanium Backup to kill off some bloatware and make more room. Rebooted many times like this over the last few months, running trouble-free. Many thanks to you all.

INCREDIBLEC XC SHIP S-OFF

HBOOT-0.92.0000

MICROP-0417

TOUCH PANEL-ATMEL224_16ab

RADIO-2.15.00.07.28

Jul 23 2010, 18:06:51

ClockworkMod Recovery v2.5.1.2

(I know - time to update ClockworkMod too...)

The Story:

Ok - so I keep my phone kind of full. The low memory bug plagued me but I kept it at bay by clearing some cache occasionally. The 750MB partition for apps, though, was always almost full. I also still had the original 2GB SDcard that came with the phone, and there was not enough room to make a nandroid backup. So, when I rooted the phone, I had the bright idea to move all the Titanium Backup data over to the 6GB of unused internal storage (emmc). That gave me plenty of room for clockworkmod to do its thing on the sdcard. But, foolishly, after getting a 32GB card, I never moved Titanium Backup back to the SDcard. Neither did I enable the sync to dropbox feature. After all, why back things up if its running perfectly? Well, I learned my lesson the hard way.

With Angry Birds RIO over and done I decided it was time to take a leap, back it up, and uninstall it to make some elbow room. Backup, Uninstall, No Problem. Next, I figure, why not try to restore it to make sure all my scores come back. Force Close, Reboot, No big deal. Hmmm... maybe it needs a little more room to expand the backup before it restores it. So, I uninstalled another large app (which had a minimal effect since it was actually on the sdcard), and tried restoring AB again. But this time everything started force closing all at once. I turned it off, and put it in my pocket since I was heading out. When I restarted it later, it bootlooped with a very loud "DROID!" every 30 seconds during the boot animation. (heh... This was, naturally, during a serious presentation in a quiet room filled with about 150 people... )

Every thread about boot looping suggests solving it by wiping the phone and trying a new or stock rom. That's when I got nervous. Because I could not see my internal storage when booting into recovery. And that's where all my backups were. I went nuts looking for a way, and stumbled on the right combination of commands to pull emmc though adb.

After that, I flashed jermaine151's Stock+ rom and it's been working great. (I should note that following his minimal wiping instructions kept my emmc intact after all, so all my fears were unfounded.) First thing I did was move all my backups to the SDcard and set up sync to dropbox. Next I think I'll try Warm2.3 or MikRunny 1.01 if I'm feeling brave.

Of course, a week later I found this XDA post with almost the exact command I used. That would have saved me about an hour and a half. Hopefully this might help someone else looking for their emmc data after a broken screen or whatever.

I contacted the Titanium Backup developer about the issue - boot looping after restoring on a nearly full device - but haven't heard back yet.

Thanks to all for this forum and your excellent work.