Data recovery on boot-looped Samsung Galaxy S II GT-i9100

Question

I have a boot-looped Samsung Galaxy S II GT-i9100, running the Android 2.3 Gingerbread it came with, unrooted and unmodified (although Optus-branded).
The phone's battery depleted while the phone was running; now, any attempt to boot the phone results in the boot sequence looping indefinitely.
I wish to recover data from this device (before attempting to solve the boot-loop problem later via factory reset or other method).

I read the boot-loop tag information but the instructions have not been helpful for me: I have tried to boot into Safe Mode, but my attempts also trigger the indefinite boot-loop; I wiped the cache via stock recovery but that had no effect; and, the last recommendation was a factory reset which I won't follow until I have recovered the data.

I believe USB Debugging is already enabled. I have an 8GB external SD card and I have Linux Mint 13 as my desktop operating system.

This answer indicated that it should be possible to root the phone and recover data via the Android Debug Bridge (ADB) for a different Samsung Galaxy S version, but I need instructions for the Samsung Galaxy S II GT-i9100 if this avenue is worth pursuing.
This seems related to this question but could be a different variant and issue. It's not the same as this question because I need to recover data.

warsong · Answer

Firstly it may be useful to merge this with your other question as they are very related.

I have already explained to you how to root your S2 so I won't repeat those instructions.
And yes it is possible to recover the /data.
What you need to do from here is to first complete what I said about rooting it. From there, you should get a new rooted recovery (CWM). Within that recovery you will find options to backup the phone and to mount it over USB. It should be simple enough to just backup the /data partition from the rooted recovery and copy it over to your computer.

Not sure if you know this but you can easily navigate the backups to recover whatever there is of value to yourself, there are various programs that do this but first things first get that phone rooted and get into the CWM recovery and make that backup. The options to do so should be very clear in the recovery. You can also create backups from the stock recovery but I wouldn't recommend this as you still need to be able to mount the phone via USB.

Data recovery on boot-looped Samsung Galaxy S II GT-i9100

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