My older Samsung 480V is acting weird. It starts to boot up, the blue line at the bottom appears, breaks up, appears again, a non stop cycle. It will not boot up completely.

First I thought it might be the battery, but in a store a new battery was tried and according to the sales rep it is a software issue. He says there is no way I will be able to recover my contacts which are saved on the internal phone memory only. Is he correct?