[Galaxy S II Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] CoinCoin88:
Hi guys,

I'm truly desperate tonight. This morning I was at work and recieved a phone call. Answered, everything was fine, and put the phone back again on my desk. Half an hour ater, wanted to send a text, so I tried using the phone: screen remained black. I was like "ok,, this stupid S2 froze again, I'll just reboot it bu pulling the battery out".

Did so and........ still nothing. WTF? So I tried plugging it to charge (AC adapter). No "battery" symbol on screen, nothing. Starting to freak out a bit... I trie with a colleague's AC Adapter, same deal. I also tried with his battery, still no go. Phone remains totally off, nothing on screen, can't enter download mode. The only change when I remove the battery/put it back in is that the phone remains cold at first, and then a couple seconds (30?) after I hit the power button, you can start feeling CPU/GPU getting warmer on the right of the camera lens. So basically there's electricity flowing.

Tonight I gave it a go and opened it up to check if something's fried inside. The only odd thing was that BAT500 (google for some explainations) had leaked but the leak was NOT (and I really mean it) causing damages (yet). I removed the battery, as it does not impact dramatically the phone (just causes the date etc to reset to 01/01 when you remove the battery, apparently). But phone still won't boot, no logo, no "battery chrging", no light on screen...

This really looks like the "hard brick" emmc bug, however I've been running 4.0.3 rooted with Chainfire's CWM kernel for the last 6 months or so, and I never did any wipe or "reset to factory". So the so-called "hard brick bug" shouldn't occur. But symptoms sure look like it.

So to get back to my opening phrase, I am truly desperate. I do have backups of nearly every SMS/MMS (maybe not the last 2-3 days but well... I'll get over it) on my Gmail account, however what I don't have is a backup of my contacts. For some reasons, I don't like my contacts to be synced with Gmail, so they were left on the phone's memory (and not the SD card, because I always thought (how stupid of me) "well why put a SD card inside when there's like 16GB of embed storage ?!"). So I'm f**ked for my contacts, and also for many many pictures that were still inside the phone and not yet extracted to my computer.

So the question (for which I fear I already have the answer): is there ANYTHING I can do? i've contacted a guy in Paris who owns a USB jig, so I'll give it a try this week-end if he's available. But other than that, is there ANY way to recover something from my brick? Or someone witha genius idea of how to turn it back on for at least 5-10 minutes... ?

Any help is appreciated ;) I'm really feeling stupid, as I'm always backuping everything, and I probably have backups of backups of backups.... but just not for this stupid phone...

Regards...

PS: Symptoms:

* Black screen, nothing booting nor charging

* When putting battery back on, nothing happens. If I hit the power button, phone starts getting just a bit warm near the lens (right side of it)

* No download mode

* Power+Vol down+Home + usb connection: nothing on screen, nothing on computer, no USB detected, ODIN sees nothing

* No it's not just the screen who died

Edit: Could JTAG be the magic solution? If so, is there any thread here like the "find a USB jig near you"... ? Wouldn't find the equivalent.