n800 not booting and-or constantly rebooting
 

Well, I didn't want to have to start a thread for this, but I'm not seeing my symptoms in any of the other threads that I've found.

For the past week and a half, the device has been acting a bit funny, there seemed to be a couple of issues. First, it was taking forever to boot (5-10 minutes); second, once booted, the thing was really, really slow. I managed to take care of the second issue, it seemed that the 'metalayer-crawler' was eating up 75% of the cpu. So, I stopped the daemon, and did a 'chmod a-x /etc/init.d/metalayer-crawler' which worked. I have rebooted successfully since I did that, however now, I am not getting past the 'Nokia' splash-screen, and once in a while, maybe after about 10~20 minutes, it will flash black, and show the splash screen again.

I'm pretty sure that this is not a battery/charge issue. I'm running the latest firmware. I did recently update some packages, including kagu, osso-rtcom, and microb. I also got rid of canola. I don't want to have to flash this thing to get it up and running, but I'm not quite sure what else I can do. I've pulled the battery out for a few minutes, didn't help. I've tried with it plugged in, and unplugged. I've pulled my SDHC cards, and still nothing.

A little background, I've had this device for about three months (mostly working just fine), I'd had the 770 before that, so I'm pretty familiar with this device. I've also got several Linux boxes at home, and administer a Linux server, so I know my way around Linux. Just to let you know that I'm prepared to hammer at this thing until it works. But, is there any way of getting at the root filesystem without this thing turned on? Or, does anybody have any advice besides re-flashing the device?

Thanks.

Re: n800 not booting and-or constantly rebooting
 

Nevermind, I flashed it. It boots up.

Re: n800 not booting and-or constantly rebooting
 

Unfortunately, the stupid thing is doing the same thing again. This time, I have not edited any config files, and i did not make anything in the /etc/init.d non-executable. I do not have osso-rtcom installed.

It had been taking a little bit longer than normal to boot up, but nothing too unreasonable. Before I had to reboot, kagu had frozen (the only thing besides the browser and FM radio that I ran while it was on yesterday), so I killed it. It wouldn't start back up, so I turned off the device, and when I tried to turn it on again, brought up the 'Nokia' screen, and won't budge from there (several hours later).

Now that the issue is repeating itself, I'm not too thrilled about the idea of re-flashing the device again, because it took me several days to get everything back to where I wanted it. Plus, it doesn't seem like that would necessarily do me any good.

Any suggestions to get this thing booted up would be very helpful. Thank you.

Re: n800 not booting and-or constantly rebooting
 

Funny, since I upgraded a few days ago to the latest version of Kagu (which I love), I'm also encountering a very slow booting from flash. (My OS clone on my MMC however boots fine -- and I have the new version of Kagu on that as well). So, I suspect the culprit is not Kagu. And once booted in flash, some applications are also slow to come up. Sometimes if I remove the back (with its magnet?), that'll restore the situation. A big mystery for me. But at least it's all still working, and I can always fall back on the MMC clone in an emergency. (Maybe I should always be booting from the MMC?)

Re: n800 not booting and-or constantly rebooting
 

Jim - it sounds like something is hogging CPU, I suggest you open xterm and run "top" for a few minutes to see which is the top process (it's sorted on descending CPU usage). Chances are it's metalayer-crawler...

Re: n800 not booting and-or constantly rebooting
 

Milhouse: I ran "top" in xterm both as user and root, and after waiting more than five minutes in each, got no results. (And I tried this also in my MMC clone installation, with the same (non-) results. Am I doing something wrong. Is there an option I should be attaching to "top?" Thanks for your response in this matter. Regards, Jim

Re: n800 not booting and-or constantly rebooting
 

I've made some headway here. (Some, not much). There were a couple other threads that popped up with people having some similar issues, mostly the slowness and the lack of booting. It turns out that everybody having these issues had just installed VideoCenter. Something that I hadn't thought about simply because I hadn't really gotten a chance to use it. I don't think that anyone came up with a good reason why this had happened, and I just decided not to install it from now on. (I'll file a bug when I get a few free minutes).

Now, there was also the issue of general slowness, which was caused by /etc/init.d/metalayer-crawler0, which when you run "/etc/init.d/metalayer-crawler0 stop" as root, the device is a lot happier. I should also note that the metalayer-crawler was not always out of control, this might have occurred after installing videocenter, or something else. I'm not sure.

The kagu issue, for me, seems to be restricted to kagu's performance. While it is my default media player, it takes forever and a day to get the thing running. It took over a half and hour last night to load before I gave up on it and stopped paying attention. (And of course, the battery was dead this morning).

So, ascherjim, I'd try stopping the metalayer-crawler daemon first, then looking to see if there is anything else going on. You can always start it back up if you want to, though I'm pretty sure that if you don't use maemo's default media player stuff, it's basically 100% useless.

Re: n800 not booting and-or constantly rebooting
 

Emil: Thanks for the advice, but unfortunately stopping the metalayer-crawler did not have any noticeable effect on the slowness of my flash booting. However, I think now I'll just wait until the new N800 firmware is released next month and see whether that reflashing will have any effect on the situation. Thanks again. Jim

Re: n800 not booting and-or constantly rebooting
 

I had the same problem recently. Slow boot, slow system response, not shutting down cleanly. I had not installed anything new. In fact my N800 had been sitting for about a month not being used before this happened.
I flashed to 4.2007 38-2, re-installed my backup, and the problem cleared up.

Re: n800 not booting and-or constantly rebooting
 

Just documenting my symptoms in case it helps solve this...

My N800 boot now takes over 2 minutes to get to the point where the blue bar starts across the screen. Running OS2007 4.2007.26-8.

I have installed quite a few apps over the last week, but no Kagu or Videocenter on this unit. Standard Opera browser.

I don't seem to be short of device memory... 18MB used, 137.7MB available. And internal memory card (the one shipped with the N800) is 65MB used, 55MB available (I allocated 64MB to virtual memory). Available virtual memory is 112MB. No removable SD card installed.

The only process I have caught occasionally maxing the CPU for any period of time is "pdflush".

I probably won't reflash at this point... I'll wait for OS2008 and do it then.

Re: n800 not booting and-or constantly rebooting
 

I'm having a similar problem, I haven't used it for a few weeks and the battery must have died, now when I put it on the charger it flashes over and over the Nokia flash screen and then stops, it never boots up. It just sits there blank screen. I don't know if it is charging as there is no external light. What happened to it?

Re: n800 not booting and-or constantly rebooting
 

Corruption maybe? Could have tried writing to flash while the power went out *shrug*

There's probably a way to get it to spew out some text to give a hint as to what's wrong, but you'll probably just want to reflash it.

Re: n800 not booting and-or constantly rebooting
 

nope never tried to flash it, never got around to it. It worked then sat. Thats it, how do I begin to start it up? Is there some reset button or button pattern?

Re: n800 not booting and-or constantly rebooting
 

Sorry, I meant the device might have tried writing to flash memory as the battery died (maybe an evil process like the media crawler that indexes audio/video/etc)

I'm not aware of any special reset, aside from flashing firmware from a computer.

Re: n800 not booting and-or constantly rebooting
 

Leave it plugged in for eight hours and see if that helps. Check the battery, reset it in the slot. I have several batteries, so I would try replacing it, but you probably only have the one.

But reflashing should be the ultimate fix, if there is one.

Re: n800 not booting and-or constantly rebooting
 

its been charging for over 24, and still nothing, if I had to flash it. How would I do it?

Re: n800 not booting and-or constantly rebooting
 

Just curious, what was the used software version in the device?

Re: n800 not booting and-or constantly rebooting
 

ok as weird as it was that it stopped working is the same situation for it to start. I pressed a few button combinations and plugged and unplugged it and now it works, Weird stuff. Its still charging though, even after 2 straight days of being plugged in