Yesterday a co-worker asked me if I could recover his personal data off his android phone.  The phone went into a boot loop and he can't get to the OS any more.  Getting another phone isn't a problem, but he has a bunch of pictures at least he wants to get off, and SMS messages if possible.  It sounded like an interesting challenge so I said I'd give it a try.

HTC Incredible (v.1), running android 2.2. Luckily (or not), the phone is rooted.  I did a bunch of research and found that a factory reset doesn't remove personal data, but memory wipe will.  Selecting factory reset brings me to the Clockworkmod 2.5.0.5 recovery menu, which doesn't give an option to factory reset without memory wipe.  I did a backup to a spare SD card and extracted the IMG files, but the pictures/SMS messages were not in there, though system data and application data were.

As almost a last ditch effort, i applied the latest CyanogenMod without wiping the device, hoping I could at least get to a point where the internal memory is mountable, but the CyanogenMod boot-loops as well.  Sounds like hardware failure to me.

SO: does anyone know of a tool that can be loaded onto the device or accessed through windows/linux that will allow access to the internal memory of this device?  Has anyone had to do this kind of recovery before?

Thanks!

Having you tried mounting the device as USB storage from the Clockworkdmod menu?  Boot into Clockworkmod, connect the phone to a computer via the USB cable, select "mounts and storage", then select "mount USB storage".  This should mount the device to the computer and you should be able to access the internal memory this way.

Disclaimer: I just went through the process of installing a hacked version of ICS this last weekend - first time installing a modded firmware on my Android device - so this is just from my limited experience haha

I'm pretty sure it's internal storage; I don't have an external SD card so I'm just inferring.  I haven't started learning how my phone works until I installed the new firmware this last weekend

Oops, i should read the entire thread. you are right: the usb connection normally just allows access to the sd card.

This might get better results: go into the settings and turn on usb debugging and allow installation of nonmarket applications. USB debugging is found under Settings - application settings - development. The phone will probably complain about this (mine does, quite verbosely), but your clockworkmod might work better with the usb debugging turned on.

Good luck.

I too suspect that you're dealing with a hardware failure and who knows what else.. Perhaps you'd have better luck finding a solution from
http://androidforums.com/android-phones/ 

Good luck.  :/