Text message SMS recovery from old broken Droid, after Verizon transfer to new Droid

[hbcannon]

I need help with something that doesn't seem like it would be all that out of the ordinary, but I don't find any threads addressing it.

I have the original Droid. The touch screen broke (I could no longer unlock it), so I went to Verizon to get a replacement. My broken phone had a ton of old text messages and contacts. I had never done anything to back them up, wrongly assuming that the connection with Google would take care of all that. The Verizon staff assured me that all of the contacts would transfer over to the new phone. They largely did transfer, except for about the 20 most recently entered contacts–which of course was very annoying!

The Verizon staff said that the text messages would not transfer over, and they did not know of any way to recover or archive the text messages on the broken phone. I have kept the old phone in hopes that there is a way to recover and archive those old text messages. I don't necessarily need to move them to the new phone, but I would like to have a backup of them, ideally in my Google mail “SMS” folder, which I have set up with the "SMS Backup" app I have installed on my new Droid. it would be a bonus to also recover the 20 or so contacts that didn't transfer over. But I'm less concerned about that.

when Verizon set up my new phone, they moved over the battery and SD memory card from the old phone. So my old phone does not have an SD memory card, unless I were to take it out of my new phone and move it over, or insert a blank one (which I would need to purchase).

At this point I've been using my new phone for several months, and it has hundreds of new text messages, thousands of new contacts, etc. so I don't want to disturb it.

After reading through lots of threads about recovering data from a broken phone, or recovering text messages, I installed SPRecovery on the old phone, per this thread:
http://www.droidforums.net/forum/tec...-unlock-2.html
When I tried to do a Nandroid Backup, it didn't work and I got and “error code 31”–which I assume stems from the fact that there was no SD card in the old phone, which is where the Nandroid Backup would try to write the backup. I'm willing to purchase a new, blank SD card, if that is part of the easiest solution. But I'm wondering if the SPRecovery route will actually work for me, as I don't want to restore everything to my new Droid; I just want to archive the data on my computer.

Is there a relatively easy way to recover the hundreds of text messages from my old phone (to archive them onto my computer)? And if I do get the text messages off the old phone somehow, what is the best way to put them into a usable archive format – ideally something like the Gmail SMS folder – where they are grouped by conversation, I can hide or show detailed info like exact time and date of each message, etc.

A second, less important question –I have held on to the old phone for several months now, and still hope to send it back to Verizon for refund of $500 charge they placed on my account. Does anyone know if I send it back to them with SP recovery installed, will that impede getting my $500 refund?

Many thanks for any help with this!