[Galaxy S I9000 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] scouser27:
Hi all

First post. There's a bit of detail here as I'm not sure if there's something that might be relevant to the question that I'll be asking.

I had my phone rooted for a year or two now, "happily" sitting on stock Gingerbread. Over the weekend, I decided to take the plunge and install CyanogenMod 10.2

Prior to starting, I went in to ClockWorkMod Recovery and made a Nandroid backup. (CWM was installed when I rooted the phone, it was version 2.5.1.0)

I also used TitaniumBackup to back up all of my contacts and SMS messages (wasn't bothered with anything else).

I downloaded CM 10.2 from the website and gapps-jb-2013013 to go with it. I read around how to do the update and armed with the laptop for googling, I began:

Wiped everything and began flashing CM.

It failed. Got an Error 0 when trying to install the package.

Googled furiously, tried editing a line in the CM zip file (something to do with detecting the model of my phone), then flashing it from the external SD card. Still nothing. Copied original CM zip file back to the external SD card. Eventually got fed up and rebooted phone to recovery thinking I was beaten and I'd have to restore to stock :(

But then I notice that CWM has changed. Now I have the gears/orange/hat logo, it's reporting that it's version 6.x

So it seems that it updated CWM. I'm wondering if that might have been causing the problems...

So I now try to re-flash CyanogenMod. It flashes. Flash gapps too: It works - Hooray! Try rebooting -> bootloop :( (although at least now it's a cyanogenmod bootloop )

Can't power off phone, so I remove the battery, give it the old DOS 15 seconds, battery back in and boot to recovery again.

Wiped partitions again, reflashed CyanogenMod and gapps and this time it works. Hooray again! Reboot phone and in no time it's asking about google accounts and such. AWESOME (albeit slightly nervewracking)

So I have CM 10.2 running and Play Store runs and I can download apps. I pull down Titanium, restore my contacts to test it out.

Crash. (Something about acore process has stopped ...)

Reboot. acore still crashing.

OK, no panic. It's probably broken, but the since I've just flashed it and have nothing on there other than ROM and gapps, I can do it again.

Did. Went fine. New Nandroid Backup as a precaution.

So, Titanium won't extract contacts. Wasn't going to chance it with SMS messages, so held off on installing it again.

Googled some more, read about AppExtractor which can talks directly to Nandroid backups.

Installed AppExtractor, tried restoring contacts - blanks the 3 contacts I had started manually creating and leaves me with nothing.

Rebooted just in case. Still nothing :(

Tried it again just in case it would prefer an empty contacts location. Still Nothing.

Decided that because I now have a Nandroid backup of CM, I'll go back to stock, export SMS and contacts out to some sort of neutral format, then come back to CM (with newly acquired Nandroid backup) and import. Should be straightforward.

And as if you couldn't guess: It wasn't.

CWM (6.x) refuses to restore the stock rom (I've also tried using a backup that I made about 6 months ago, no luck there either).

So the situation is now: Phone running fine on CM 10.2.1 (only one spontaneous reboot and subsequent bootloop), but can't restore old Nandroid backups (taken with CWM 2.5.1.0 speedmod).

I've tried e-mailing the author of AppExtractor but haven't heard anything back.

Finally, to the questions (thanks for your patience)

Any thoughts on why I can't go back to the old stock rom? Is there no backward compatibility?

And: Any way to restore SMS messages and contacts from the old stock rom to the new CM rom (if AppExtractor doesn't work).

Thanks in advance

Scouser27