Infinite boot loop on Orange S2 (rooted)

[Guest Mug UK]

I rooted my S2 back in the summer and everything has been fine. Last week (14th) I put my phone on top of one of work's hand-dryers (those souped-up Dyson ones) and quickly moved it as I started the dryer. Thought I was quick enough but as soon as I got back to my desk I noticed my phone had locked up completely. Did some power resets and it would just boot-up, get as far as the second S2 logo and then reset back to the Orange animation logo. Rinse and repeat .. over and over again.

I reset all the caches I could find, removed the SD card and all other kinds of quick fixes but no luck. However, I'd made a backup back in August so, after a lot of trial an error of restoring just the boot, then the system, I got the phone working again. All I had to do was update the SU.BIN and the phone was working.

A quick holiday to Germany, abusing various hotels' Wi-Fi and I get back yesterday to find that, after leaving it in flight-mode whilst flying back (I thought I'd powered it off), I rebooted the phone once I'd landed to get another problem. Almost everything wouldn't work once the phone was loaded. Market would Force Close first, followed by other system apps. If I managed to get past these, and switch on my data network, it would just unleash a torrent of similar messages but to the point where the Log process would appear, I'd Force Close it, then it would reappear straight away. The only solution was to hold the power switch down until it switched off.

Me thinking ahead, I decided to back up all my pictures and videos from the holiday whilst I could see the files under Windows and try fixing it the same way I did above. Only this time the files from the August backup are no longer to be found and I only had the back up I'd done *prior* to fixing it. So I can only now restore a knackered boot-up process :(

So, I'm hoping there's some simple steps to which I can get all the data off my phone (old pictures etc.) and then reset the phone back to the original Orange firmware (as I need the 'Your Orange' and 'Orange WiFi' apps as I'm on Panther and use the data coverage/BT Openzone connections a lot, especially in Starbucks in Germany!). I don't mind losing apps as, in theory, they're all inside that data backup from the 14th ... or are they?

What is my next step? Should I just plump for a custom ROM and then install the missing Orange apps afterwards (Is this possible?) ... or do I restore it to an Orange original and reinstall all the apps that I need/use the most?

[Guest Mug UK]

Used Gary Crutcher's ROM (http://android.modac...xxkl1-released/) from the 2nd of December and Google Market is currently downloading (zzz) all 81 of the apps that it knew about. At least this is grabbing the Orange stuff too, so not as bad as I'd thought it'd be. The intro animation is better than the stock Orange one too.

I'm guessing I'll have to reinstall the silent version of the camera software as that came in handy for not deafening insects in macro mode :)

I'm sure there's going to be other stuff I've missed .. but I'll work them out as the time comes.

Edited December 21, 2011 by Mug UK

[Guest Mug UK]

Update of the update: Google Market didn't in the end download all the apps it reckoned I had installed previously .. instead it just grabbed the ones that it knew I'd splashed out on recently in the 10p sale - but not the others (acquired via other means). Others that I'd purchased such as Stair Dismount with all the level packs weren't brought back.

The majority of them it failed with a 'not enough memory space' errors. Luckily AppMonster found quite a few lurking on the SD card. Astro found a few others so it's getting there. Nowhere near the 81 apps I did have though.

Is there any way of getting all my old text messages back that weren't backed up to Gmail via the SMS->Gmail app I used a month or so ago? I'd only recently switched to Handcent, so would reinstalling Handcent get my text messages back, or are they gone for a burton? Can I extract them from my data backup of the 14th of December?