[AT&T Samsung Galaxy S II SGH-I777] snackorders:
I am prepared to be slammed for asking this in the wrong place, etcetera, but if you can even TELL me where to go to get help I will be very appreciative.

My problem: Galaxy s2 SGH-I777 At&T, from what I gather from jargon on countless sites I have visited, I believe the phone is rooted, which is to say I know so little about it that I have never attempted to change anything from 'factory' stuff. I know nothing about kernels, flash, odin, adb, jigs, Odin, and many others. I installed kies on my pc, but my phone is not recognized as it does not advance beyone the 'Rethink Possible' screen. I have seen many suggestions, but they all seem to depend on being able to get past that screen, which I cannot. I CAN get to the recover screen, but it does nothing. I foolishly took it to AT&T and they took it 'to the back', and returned momentarily with my phone telling me, "I reinstalled the software and that didn't help, so I think you need a new phone.' I did get a new phone, but unfortunately most of my numbers and all of my personal pictures were stored to the phone and thus I cannot get to them. IMHO, as the phone is simply a computer and no data has been written over my stuff, I cannot understand why my stuff would not be retrievable. Unfortunately, I do not know how to go about it. Any help would be very greatly appreciated. Thank you. I posted that on an different, obviously less sophisticated and less intimidating site and you'll see what I was told.

Reply: If the phone numbers were entered as Google numbers (entered under your email address), put that address into Accounts on the new phone, make sure the account is set to sync contacts and you'll get them back.

As far as the other, the memory the data resides in is so far buried in other hardware that it's hardly worth what you;d have to pay in labor for someone to get the data baxck out. It would involve a lot of disassembly, building jigs, writing software, etc. The phones are made so that you can keep your contacts, photos and messages backed up easily, so there's no reason to redesign the phones to be able to recover data from a crashed phone. Basically it IS the same as any other computer. If you don't back up your data, and your hard drive crashes, you lose all your data. It's still there on the platters, but it's not economically feasible to recover it.

My reply, to which I have had no response. Any guidance will be very greatly appciated. Thank you. Thank you very much for your very prompt and detailed response. Although I was aware of the importance of backing up, I was ignorant enough to think that unlike other computers smartphones were different to the extent that everything was being saved to my SIM or sd card. And as I may have said, although some numbers are on my SIM, most are not and when I began receiving the option of where to save I ignorantly, again, believed that when I saved to 'phone' I was saving to SIM or sd. Haste indeed makes waste.

Thank you especially for explaining about the difficulty of retrieving what remains on the phone, as I thought certainly there must be an inexpensive, if complicated, way to retrieve it. Do you happen to know of any such enterprise that even offers such a retrieval service? Thanks, again!