[Nexus S Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] SpaceFuzz:
I've spent 4-6 hours researching and trying things and have become quite familiar with rooting, fastboot, adb, sideload, and various other tools and have many installed & working, so if I make a noob comment or mistake, go easy on me. I did my best to do my own due diligence.

Here's the situation:

Nexus S 4G - stock from Sprint

Android 4.1 as pushed from Sprint

Not Rooted

Debugging Mode not enabled

Launcher, UI, Settings, Apps, etc fail ("has stopped") if they use the UI

Things not requiring UI do start and run

Android boots up normally to the lock screen (I have pattern lock). Apps start up in background fine (Locale, Alarm Clock Extreme, etc). Upon unlocking, I get "Unfortunately, Launcher has stopped." Repeatedly. It won't let me click any apps. I can, however, bring down the notification window. Selecting anything in the notification window fails, with "____ has stopped," including Settings, Messaging, Google Play, etc. When I plug in USB, I see the green Android with the "Turn on USB storage" button, but I can't click it before "System UI has stopped."

Unfortunately, most solutions warn "this will wipe all user data," and I don't have backups of a hundred or more photos and videos of my daughter's first year. So wiping data will be my LAST resort...and even then I may try forensic recovery from a dd image (I work in Computing Security, so have a fairly good technical background).

What I've tried, and result:

Reboot into recovery - I get dead Android with red exclamation

Wipe cache & reboot - no improvement (tried 5-10 times)

Reboot into Safe Mode - no improvement

Push 3rd party launcher - installs, but upon unlocking and selecting Launcher / Go Launcher (.e.g), I get "Go Launcher has stopped."

Fastboot - I get device listed/connected, but most commands cause wipe, so I haven't ventured much further

Calling Sprint and having Jellybean re-pushed to my device - it appeared to push (I saw update status message), but when I rebooted, no apparent difference (maybe it didn't push?)

Add/Remove apps via Play Store - works fine. I can remove apps (and have removed nearly all) and add apps, and they uninstall or install successfully (notification window confirms). But I can't access any newly installed apps due to the "stopped working" window.

Suggestions I can't try:

adb backup/shell/pull etc - my debugging mode is not on and I can't turn it on.

USB backup - can't enable USB Mode, and I don't have an automount capability

fastboot oem unlock - wipes phone

I want to try adb sideload <image>, but I haven't been able to confirm whether this truly wipes the user partition or not. If anyone can confirm, let me know. My phone enters sideload mode via:

1) boot to fastboot (power + vol up from OFF)

2) select recovery

3) at dead android with red exclamation, again press power + vol up and release. Menu appears only after you release.

4) 2nd option is "Apply update from ADB" which puts phone into special adb mode where the ONLY command accepted from your PC is "adb sideload."

Any suggestions on how I may be able to retrieve my photos and videos given this completely borked OS?

Thanks.