Re: Soft Reset WITHOUT Removing Battery?
 

remember to not do it too many times in sequence without shutting down normally in between, there is a number that grows fast if you reboot, and somthing bad happens when it gets too big, shutting down normally resets that number to zero

Re: Soft Reset WITHOUT Removing Battery?
 

Huh? What are referring to here? What number that grows?

Re: Soft Reset WITHOUT Removing Battery?
 

That is a valid point, but can someone address my original question please?

How do you reboot a device that's frozen while off (without removing the battery)

Re: Soft Reset WITHOUT Removing Battery?
 

it's somthing that counts how many times you rebooted, but it counts multiple times for each reboot instead of just +1

Re: Soft Reset WITHOUT Removing Battery?
 

see if you can access it via SSH and run sudo reboot now remotely

Re: Soft Reset WITHOUT Removing Battery?
 

If it's locking up while idle/charging you have something bad going on in the software. The solution isn't to find a way to reset the device, it's to figure out why it's doing that and correcting what's causing the lockup. Removing the battery is a quick fix, not a way to handle a regularly locking device. Power resets have the potential of losing data and/or causing file system corruption, which can make your device unstable. If you're in an inflatable raft with a hole, your solution shouldn't be connecting an air pump, it should be patching the leak in a permanent way.

If it's doing it regularly, I suggest loading up a monitoring program and seeing when/why it dies. Once you fix whatever is causing the lockup you won't need a way to power-kill the device to reset it. Providing one will just enable you to use the quick and easy method until it causes more side-effects that are harder to diagnose or correct, assuming they're correctable at all.

Re: Soft Reset WITHOUT Removing Battery?
 

this still doesn't make any sense to me. What 'thing'? A counter in a system file? hardware?!

I just can't see why this, if it really does exist, is in any way connected to the OP's problem...

/confused

Re: Soft Reset WITHOUT Removing Battery?
 

If you install Desktop Command Widget, one of the options is 'Boot Count', this counts how many times your phone has been rebooted but is reset if you turn the phone off. When you do reboot though it seems to go up by like 3 or 4. A while ago I read that if it got to 50 your phone would completely stop booting up, not sure if thats been fixed or not though.

Re: Soft Reset WITHOUT Removing Battery?
 

You are absolutely correct in saying that there's possibly something more serious going on which is causing my N900 to lock up. Can you suggest any monitoring tool to diagnose this issue?

The one common factor I have found is that the device locks up often in the following scenario: I turn the device off (completely) in the evening and then plug it in to charge using native charger (I may sometimes plug it in during the shutdown process, in the middle of it). In the morning I disconnect the charger, and almost immediately press and hold the power button to turn the device on, at which point it does not turn on. I remove the battery and the device does turn on, but I notice that the battery is nowhere near being fully charged. This would probably indicate the charge never occurred overnight. From here we can speculate to the cause (whether it's a problem during shutdown or power up).

Any thoughts on this are welcome, thanks.

Re: Soft Reset WITHOUT Removing Battery?
 

There's no way. :(