How to fix Cyanogenmod 7 hanging on boot animation after NO firmware changes I've been using my Google Nexus S with Cyanogenmod 7 for about a year now. Sometimes it rebooted out of the sudden or locked up but all in all worked well.

Today I rebootet the phone und since then it hangs during boot at the animation with the rotating circle.

How do I fix the phone and get it booting again?

Unlike many issues I found on the web I did not play with the firmware recently. Unfortunately it's been quite long since the last backup. I need to dig my data from the device.

Ways acceptable for me to go:


analyzing and fixing the issue
getting all my data and install new firmware (while updating to CM10)


Analyzing the issue

I installed the Android SDK on my computer (for adb and fastboot) and successfully ran ClockworkMod Touch Recovery image which proves the the phone hardware is actually fine. Copying files from the /sdcard directory worked and I could open a shell but adb logcat doesn't work for me. The program keeps "waiting for device".

This is what I had done before:


phone hung and restarted by removing and reinserting battery
date and time were set to 2005-01-01 00:00, reset (never had that before)
installed or updated several apps through F-Droid app "store"

installed And Bible
updated Barcode Scanner
maybe updated/installed something else, but can't remember because I browsed through F-Droid quite a long time and read dozens of app descriptions

status bar crashed, phone still usable but started reboot to get status bar again
Booom! Phone hangs forever on boot animation


I have the feeling that the Google logo with the open lock which is displayed before the CM boot animation begins stays longer than before. But I am everything but sure.

Making backup

As I cannot run any backup apps I have difficulties doing a reliable backup. I set up my phone not to sync most of my data to Google. Yes, I missed doing regular backups for some time because I find doing so is not elegantly possible with Android (compared to tar c /home or even mksquashfs or rsnapshot on Linux).

What I need at least in declining order of priority:


calendar
contacts
some app's data
saved wireless credentials


What I already got using ClockworkMod Touch Recovery:


copying /sdcard with adb pull
Running backup from the ClockworkMod Touch Recovery menu -- I have no clue what is actually backed up


The ideal way would backup the whole phone so I could install CM10 and retrieve any missing data from the backup or restore the backup to get the current state.

Any suggestions?
It could even be a corrupted cache file. If you are able to boot into recovery (CWM) you can perform backups, wipe dalvik-cache  and cache and install a current CM7.2. Once in recovery you should be able to mount /data with adb also to run tar, but try the gui.