[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] backupnoob:
Hi Guys

I'm new to the Forum and start with asking a question - apologize for that, I know that it's impolite.

I'm pretty desperate at the moment. Tried to switch on my Galaxy Nexus some days ago and it did not start. If I try to switch it on (long button press), the google logo appears for about 72 seconds, then "something" happens on the screen (usually the logo becomes brighter and horizontal lines appear on the screen). And that's it.

There's no clear reason why the mobile is broken now.

The big problem is that I have lots of pictures of my little boy on that device, from his birth until now (it's his first birthday tomorrow). These pics are very very important to me, the only pictures I have from his birth. I did not backup those pictures - I'm stupid. So my goal is to rescue those images from the device somehow. Currently I'm spending every free second to read and learn how to recover those images...

Device info:

Galaxy Nexus, Tuna Maguro 16GB

HW Version: 9

Bootloader Version: PRIMEMD04

Baseband Version: I9250XXLJ1

Everything is stock version, Android 4.4.2 (I think), stock bootloader

What I've tried so far:

- Installed fastload / ADB on Ubuntu 14.04 from repo. Manually installed ADB 1.0.32 as well.

- I can boot the device into Fastboot / Rescue / Odin mode, that works.

- Tried to clear the cache. It hangs after "Formatting /cache". No "completed" message. If I go to the recovery menu now, I get a couple of messages which say

"E:failed to mount /cache (Invalid argument)"

and then lots of "Can't mount /cache/recovery/log" messages.

If I boot in Rescue Mode, select "apply update from ADB" and connect the mobile to the PC:

[ 502.524071] usb 1-5: new high-speed USB device number 3 using ehci-pci
[ 502.657321] usb 1-5: New USB device found, idVendor=18d1, idProduct=d001
[ 502.657330] usb 1-5: New USB device strings: Mfr=2, Product=3, SerialNumber=4
[ 502.657348] usb 1-5: Product: Galaxy Nexus
[ 502.657352] usb 1-5: Manufacturer: samsung
[ 502.657355] usb 1-5: SerialNumber: (redacted)

So it gets detected, at least.

Then:

$ ./adb get-state
sideload
$ ./adb devices -l
List of devices attached
(serial redacted) sideload usb:1-5
$ ./adb backup -all
adb: unable to connect for backup
$ ./adb bugreport
error: closed
$ ./adb shell pwd
error: closed
$ ./adb logcat
- waiting for device -
^C

I've downloaded the stock yakju ROM from the google dev website (can't post links, sorry).

There are a bunch of files in that archive:

$ ll
total 298996
drwxr-x--- 2 m m 4096 Aug 21 2013 ./
drwxr-xr-x 7 m m 4096 Aug 30 23:50 ../
-rw-r----- 1 m m 2363392 Aug 21 2013 bootloader-maguro-primemd04.img
-rw-r----- 1 m m 956 Aug 21 2013 flash-all.bat
-rwxr-x--x 1 m m 827 Aug 21 2013 flash-all.sh*
-rwxr-x--x 1 m m 785 Aug 21 2013 flash-base.sh*
-rw-r----- 1 m m 291192953 Aug 21 2013 image-yakju-jwr66y.zip
-rw-r----- 1 m m 12583168 Aug 21 2013 radio-maguro-i9250xxlj1.img

$ zipinfo image-yakju-jwr66y.zip
Archive: image-yakju-jwr66y.zip
Zip file size: 291192953 bytes, number of entries: 5
?rw-r--r-- 2.0 unx 4481024 b- defN 09-Jan-01 00:00 boot.img
?rw-r--r-- 2.0 unx 5042176 b- defN 09-Jan-01 00:00 recovery.img
?rw-r--r-- 2.0 unx 485561008 b- defN 09-Jan-01 00:00 system.img
-rw------- 2.0 unx 140860420 b- defN 13-Aug-13 22:56 userdata.img
-rw-r----- 2.0 unx 93 b- defN 13-Aug-13 16:00 android-info.txt

So my questions are:

Am I doing the right thing here? I Hope that this is a software problem and the hardware is ok.

If yes, which of those file(s) should I flash to the device, without risking the loss of data?

Can you think of any other possibility to recover the data? Clockwork mod or TWRP maybe? Or a custom sideload script (inside the uploaded zip file).

I've read that flashing a custom bootloader wipes the device - so maybe CW / TWRP is not a good idea...

Thank you very very much for your help.

Matt