Can adb be used to recover SMS messages while in permanent "Safe Mode"?
Try this:

cat /data/data/com.android.providers.telephony/databases/mmssms.db &gt; /sdcard/mysms.db


Which copies the SMS database across to the SDCard.

For the Telephone database, 

cat /data/data/com.android.providers.telephony/databases/telephony.db &gt; /sdcard/mytelephony.db


Its a very old trick, to pull in the databases without root. It is not guaranteed to work across all ROMs depending on how the directory permissions are set.