[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] driftinganomaly:
First, I reallize that a lot of these questions are going to be specialized and should probably be split between all of these threads that I am linking. I have read and am continuing to read a lot, but thought I would post another round of questions here for you patient, noob friendly, wonderful people. :D

Before I do anything, I really need to try to backup the pictures from the internal storage if I can. I flashed my phone to an identical setup, and while able to adb pull files when my phone is running, I have not been able to do so when in recovery. I am still an ADB beginner, but I have done a bit of pushing and pulling and chmodding, so it isn't completely foreign. I was reading in hg22's thread about repartitioning and custom pit files: http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1667886 about having to find the right recovery/kernel for adb tools to work. I was wondering if the Agat kernel doesn't have those tools built in or if it was just operator error on my part. As an alternative, I had found AROMA File manager that installs and runs in the recovery environment: http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1646108 but I would prefer to avoid flashing anything if possible. Does anyone have suggestions for using adb pull from the recovery environment?

I have read most of the emmc thread that you linked as well as Vanberge's, and some of the custom pit threads. I am interested in running the tests on the partitions before I risk flashing. It appears from the post at: http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?p=27852689#post27852689 that even the pit file from the note could work for us, but is not necessary since hg22 wrote a custom Pit for the E4GT. Since that works and with all the similarities, would the CWM_4pda_kernel.zip from http://xdaforums.com/showpost.php?p=26285877&postcount=12 work on our phone? Being able to scan for bad blocks would tell me if I can just Odin back with little to no fear of a brick, or whether I need to actually look at repartitioning her phone before it becomes a blue light special. Thanks again for all of your help.

It is not hardbricked, but I don't want to risk a hardbrick by assuming that everything will be fine. There have been quite a few that end up with a bad partition. If the partition has bad blocks, it is unusable. I don't know if it can lead to a hardbrick, but I wanted to try to find out first. I am cautious and would rather take several days to research, ask questions, and decide on a course of action. Currently, I can't afford the $100 for insurance and prefer to try to find solutions before I consider that.

Edit: It no longer boots into recovery. Usb jig brings it into download mode, so all is not lost, but adb does not recognize it in dl mode.

Edit 2: 30 minutes stuck at recovery.bin in Odin, things aren't looking good for the home team.

Edit 3: It looks like I had reason to be concerned. I am glad that it seems like Odin registers Pit before it hangs at recovery, especially since recovery is the next flash point. I will probably research for another couple of days before I try a custom pit. It seems like it is usually /data or /system at the worst, I am a bit worried that not even recovery will flash.