Help [Verizon] Can't boot. Stuck at "Android is Upgrading... Starting apps"

[snapcase]

Rooted, running Sourcery (not sure which version anymore tbh), CWM recovery.

I dropped my phone last night and originally everything seemed ok. I woke up today to see it saying that my SIM card had been removed... Ok no problem, happened before after dropping it.. pulled the battery, removed and replaced the SIM card in its slot. Booted it up and went back to sleep. When I woke again, it was still in the process of booting and blazing hot to the touch.

I booted into recovery, and tried to reboot. No dice, just the endless loading screen as before. Booted into recovery again, and cleared cache, cleared dalvik cache, and tried to reboot. It booted part-way and started optimizing apps... then the damn battery died halfway through because I forgot to plug it in. Cleared cache and dalvik cache again, rebooted after charging up a bit and leaving it plugged in.

Now, after it finished optimizing apps, it's completely stuck on "Android is upgrading... Starting apps." It's been there for around an hour and I'm out of ideas for making the damn thing boot up without a factory reset.

I don't have any ROMs on the phones storage that I could flash, I stupidly didn't make any recent backups. Is there anything I can do to save myself from having to do a full factory reset and lose all my data?

 

[scary alien]

Hey snapcase, I've moved your thread over here to the VZW all-things-root area for you.

If you can still boot it up in bootloader (fastboot) mode, you should be able to flash (fastboot flash <recovery.img>) or softboot (fastboot boot <recovery.img>) a custom recovery, which will have an adb daemon running, that you could interact with to push a ROM of your choice onto / into your "SD card" (/data/media) directory.

If you can get a custom recovery running, you should also be able to do an "adb pull /data/media" to grab the entire contents of your "SD card".

 

[snapcase]

So uh, after making this post one day shy of a year ago, I lost my phone in my house and only just today found it (asinine, I know). Is there a walkthrough for the processes you mentioned? If by custom recovery you mean CWM or TWRP, then I have one of those installed already (not sure at the moment which, I literally found it 20 minutes ago and it's charging). So probably just a walkthrough for how to pull the data and set up whatever needs setting up on my computer?

EDIT: also... anyone got a recommendation for a stable ROM for the GNex? The one that locked up on me was one of the JBsourcery versions.

 

[scary alien]

If you've got a custom recovery already installed, you should be able to launch the recovery and if you've got the proper USB drivers and the adb utility installed, you can do an "adb pull /data/media" (from your PC where the adb.exe utility lives) to grab the entire contents of your "SD card" back to your PC.

See these threads for background info on the above:

http://androidforums.com/threads/all-things-root-stickies.914686/

http://androidforums.com/threads/ve...hings-root-guide-last-update-4-4-2014.469167/
http://androidforums.com/threads/ve...ore-and-more-vzw-samsung-galaxy-nexus.474570/​

 

[snapcase]

Thanks for the help! Finally got it backed up and can now work on getting a working ROM going.

 

[scary alien]

Thanks for the help! Finally got it backed up and can now work on getting a working ROM going.

That's awesome!

Glad you found it--I still have my GNex and pull it out every once in a while--the battery seems to keep it's charge astoundingly .