[T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy S II SGH-T989] vinhisbored:
I'm having a huge problem with my T-Mobile Galaxy S2, and not it won't even completely boot up. The issue had already been around, but never this bad. Usually, when I would use my phone, it would just randomly reboot on it's own. Now, I can't even get to the main home screen or menu. When the battery is inserted, the phone will automatically try to turn on. I'll get the Samsung screen, then the "Samsung Galaxy SII Android 4G T-Mobile screen", then the phone will glitch for a second, black screen, and it'll almost have a seizure from then on. When I say that, pretty much what happens is that the screen will go black, and it'll pulse with vibrations. It'll vibrate, stop for two seconds, vibrate some more, etc. That's all it'll do from there on. It won't try to turn on when I hold the power button, and the vibrations won't stop until I take the battery out. There is no water damage, and there's just normal wear on the phone. I've had the phone since the drop, and for the most part, it's been great until now.

The phone is not rooted, and I have not installed anything crazy. Come to think about it, I didn't really even have too many apps installed on it to begin with. The phone is under warranty, so I had T-Mobile send me a replacement. My main issue now is that I have content on there that wasn't on my SD card, but on the internal hard drive that I find extremely important, and want to keep. When I connect the phone to my computer, nothing comes up because I didn't "connect" it to the computer as you normally would have to do from the phone, before the extra drives pop up on the computer. Without getting into the main menu and manually connecting the phone to the computer so that the drive will pop up, what can I do?

I've tried taking the battery, sim card and memory card out, letting it sit for a few hours, and plug it back in, but it does the same thing. The battery isn't bad, because it plugs into the replacement phone that was sent to me, and works just fine. I've also plugged into my additional batteries, and it does the same thing. I can't do the "hard reset" where you hold volume up & down, then the power button because what happens is the phone will restart itself before I can get to that point. I tried it when I was on the phone with T-Mobile, and the associate at one of the retail locations tried when I went to get a loaner. I've tried hooking up the phone to the Kies software, but it won't recognize the old phone. It will recognize the new one with no problems though.

I am in no way am I well versed with the process of flashing it or installing different things on the phone. I just used it casually for phone calls, texts, web, and an occasional game or app. I'm just stating this so that if there are any specific tips that anyone could recommend, please if possible, explain in a bit more depth, because after I posted my title, I found the related threads, and most of the steps that were recommended to others that had problems sound a bit foreign to me. I just really want to recover the photos and documents that I had on the phone before I send it back to T-Mobile.

These are the threads that I've somewhat referenced so far:

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1948094

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1457458x

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1813866

I can't seem to find anything with the same symptoms as my phone though. If anyone could let me know, that would be great. I just really want to get the content off my old phone, it's just extremely important to me. I'll be waiting on any replies. If you need and more information about what the phone is doing, or what I should try, please mention it. I will try to update this as I get replies, since I am supposed to send the phone back pretty soon. Thank you in advance.