[G2 and Desire Z Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] Tinstaafl:
A brief history:

Several weeks ago my stock Gingerbread G2's touchscreen started dying. Replacing the touchscreen didn't solve the problem. I was able to continue using it via the keyboard for a little while and, in the meantime, enabled USB Debugging (thank the stars!) while I waited for a replacement phone to arrive. I could still access some functions using the keyboard & thumbpad, although usability was limited due to the inability to back out of an application. Cue lots of battery pulls to restart at the homescreen (a pox on designers who forget one of the fundamental rules of UI: It should always be possible to go back using the current input device!).

Then the screen started a somewhat frazzled HTC image loop during boot, shortly after I started testing ADB & fastboot. Curiously it was still booting the underlying OS, as evidenced by the various chimes telling me I had messages etc, and I could still access it via ADB.

My new phone arrived (a Sony Xperia Z3 Compact. I still would prefer a proper keyboard though. Another pox on designers/manufactures who focus on marketing fads instead of functionality. I don't give a rat's arse if my phone is only 2.48291mm thick and has a screen the size of my 1st laptop. I want something small enough to use in one hand, and that has a hardware keyboard) & happily downloaded my contacts from the Borg....I mean, Google, but not notes or SMS/MMS etc. Leading to today....

I tried Sony's transfer app, but without screen viewing let alone touchscreen ability it wouldn't work (PC version, due Android version on the problem phone wasn't acceptable). Ditto problems with other root exploits. Even trying to use a recovery image on the SD card wouldn't work due to the non-root status. The recovery menu would only accept a stock image. An overriding consideration was that I didn't want to just gain root by what ever method, but I wanted to preserve my notes & sms/mms data, so fastbooting a factory image wasn't satisfactory - as far as I could tell, that would delete everything. After over a week of 0300, 0400, 0530 bed times while reading & trying the methods given in some huuuge number of XDA threads and some other websites, last night I was able to get temp root using the fre3vo exploit! Yay! At one point I had 70 threads open. It was an XDA-dev. thread that gave me the exploit though. Still couldn't do a simple Linux/Unix cp command in ADB shell to save the data but at least the file system was accessible now. Bloody frustrating!

Anyway, a bit more Googling & XDA-ing to find file locations & command formats and tonight I was able to use the ADB pull command to download the whole of the /data directory to my PC. Data saved! Even better, the Linux distro on my PC already has SQlite software to open the files. Even more yay!

I haven't tried to upload to my Xperia Z3C, but I will soon. Meanwhile my data is now available in my PC so phone access isn't as important anymore.

Some thoughts on what I went through:

Manufacturers: You do your customers a vast dis-service by making it so hard to salvage the data.

Service providers: Ditto, due to your insistance on locking down the system on the phones you sell

XDA contributers: I couldn't have done this without you, however.....it would have been easier if you *always* specified what would change/be wiped when you describe your exploit/change/recovery process. I was hesitant to try some methods due to not knowing if my data would be wiped in the process.

And after all that: Who the hell would ever want a phone that wasn't rooted? I don't even install Linux OS on my systems unless root can be gained (Ubuntu & Mint, I'm looking at you! Sudo isn't sufficient...) so I've learnt a lesson on my phone. If only I'd rooted it while it was still fully functional!

Next task? Rooting my Z3C before something goes ' bzzzzt!' on it!