[Galaxy S II Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] invader-zim:
Hello all,

I am merely posting here if anyone has a better insight or idea, since I haven't followed with all issues regarding the Galaxy S II International version.

I have purchased mine from one of my country's carrier nearly 2 years ago. I have in the course of these 2 years, rooted it, flashed CyanogenMod, and happily updated it every so often. I always used nightlies, updating almost everyday.

In the last 2 months, it had become sometimes very sluggish, frequent slowdowns, and many lockups, freezing, and some random reboots. I was getting a little tired of it, but was getting used to it.

Yesterday, I was using it normally, when a slowdown started. The app (was 3D game) got unresponsive, but I could still pull the notification drawer, so it wasn't frozen. I pulled and pushed the drawer about 2 times, and then it also stopped responding. The screen was on, touchlights were on, and since I had seen it before, I pressed the power button for a reset.

Then the first boot screen, with the yellow triangle (where it says Samsung Galaxy S II GT-I9100) appeared, but it got stuck there and didn't get past, apparently frozen.

I tried a quick more reboots, and then tried (with very difficulty) entering CWM recovery. I got eventually there, and CWM was working as it should. I considered wiping the cache, or just reinstalling the last nightly I had saved, but decided first to just press "reboot system now".

It also got stuck on the yellow triangle initial screen. This time I couldn't get to the CWM recovery (it seems there was a very small time frame to it to enter before it actually restarted again from long pressing the power button). In a dark room, I noticed that even when the yellow triangle screen was black, the display was on, the backlight was on. The black was bright, and if I pressed the powerbutton for a reset, I could see the screen actually turning off and then on again, and going back to the yellow triangle screen.

I tried to go into Odin recovery, and eventually made it there.... So I pressed to restart the phone, and it continued frozen on the yellow triangle.

I went home with the screen frozen (I couldn't power it off, and I didn't remove the battery). I noticed that after some minutes it restarted, the screen went black and again to the frozen yellow triangle.

I managed to get to CWM recovery after several attempts with the 3 button press, but a different error had appeared: E: Can't mount /cache/recovery/command (or something like it)

So I got home, downloaded codeworkx CWM recovery, put the S2 in Odin recovery, and using Heimdall uploaded it. It completed successfully.

I managed after several tries to get to CWM recovery, it opened again, but more "Can't mount messages" appeared, system_log and such, as I have seen on some forums, and that by then I never had. Read somewhere that probably the system partition got corrupted.

Then this time I reinstalled from the internal memory another nightly I had. I was with June 19, and used the June 16 one. It flashed successfully.

Then I pressed reboot system now, but still got stuck at the yellow triangle screen. And again the message "Can't mount /cache/recovery/command".

So I got into Odin recovery mode (volume down) and using Heimdall again uploaded CWM recovery. But Heimdall got stuck at "Loading KERNEL 100%" It reached 100% but never exited. And the bluebar that was supposed to appear on the S2 screen (that appeared the first time I flashed CWM), didn't appear.

Since it got stuck there for a while, I Ctrl-C'ed my way out of Heimdall, and pressed the power putton on the S2 for another reset.

But this time, it never woke up again. No more yellow triangle screen. No more "active bright black screen". Nothing.

And it doesn't charge even when plugged to the charger.

I am reading about SGS2 that won't turn on and won't charge. It seems a general agreement that Samsung assistance tells us it's a motherboard failure, and should be replaced (and at least here in my place it's helluva expensive).

Since many cases the phone just went dead, mine wasn't quite the case, since it was somewhat alive in the yellow triangle and apparently I could have f*cked up when I Ctrl+C'ed Heimdall and turned off the phone when Odin recovery clearly states "Do not turn off target !!", even though when the flash goes ok, you have to reset it.

Two questions:

1. Is there anything else that can I do to revive it?

2. Can I recover at least the pictures and videos I had saved on the internal memory? I had a ton of pictures and videos inside DCIM/Camera, where for a long time CM10.1 camera could only save pictures to the Internal memory, and when a nightly fixed it, I kept it in internal memory.

If anyone got this far since I was exhaustingly detailed, thank you for your attention!