Accessing my phone whose screen died My Samsung's screen (Samsung S-III mini) seems to be dead (it suffered mechanical damage at the top, mostly the right corner).  I can't really tell if the phone boots completely normally or not, tho it does generate the usual little tune that it does at boot, so it seems like maybe it does boot more or less normally.

When I connect it to the charger, it does give me the usual "beep".

I tried to access it via adb but adb devices doesn't list anything and adb shell says error: device not found.  I did access it via adb before, and IIRC it required some interaction on the phone to enable incoming access via ADB, so maybe the problem is that I'd need to perform this interaction but without seeing anything it's rather impossible.

So I'm looking for some kind of "secret handshake" I could use to get access to the machine, so as to extract the data it has on the internal flash?

Maybe some tool that can just extract a raw image of whole flash partitions (i.e. the reverse of rom-flashing)?
The screen can be replaced.

In the interim, you can install the Android USB driver. The device will show up. After that, you can take screenshots of the screen using Eclipse with ADT plugin or Android Studio. You can also check the Log Cat window.