ARGH! Locked out of phone!!!
 

O.K. It is annoying enough that the damn phone is constantly winding up with a re-arranged desktop with randomly deleted items when I forgot to lock it before putting it in the case, but now it's gone and really pissed me off... somehow or other, on Friday morning, after I answered the phone half asleep and set it down, that damn thing wound up activating a passcode lock. Which is not the default 12345, nor it is anything I've ever used apparently.

How in the hell can I bypass this? I can't even back up the phone now, because it is defaulting to USB mode. In fact, I'm not even getting phone calls at this point, everything is being routed straight to voicemail even though the phone is on and fully charged. WTF?

Even though I'm a Unix/Linux professional, and love the concept of a truly open source phone OS and a phone that encourages you to become "root", I can't deal this; my business lives and dies with my damn phone. I'm seriously thinking about just writing this off and getting a damn iPhone 4 from Verizon.

Please help. Everything I've seen today presumes that you already can access the phone and need to recover a lost lock code, not that you're locked out of the phone and need to get back in... while my address book is backed up in multiple places, I really don't want to lose my recent text message archive, or the notes, etc.

Re: ARGH! Locked out of phone!!!
 

Re: ARGH! Locked out of phone!!!
 

Re: ARGH! Locked out of phone!!!
 

Re: antezz

Uh. Hello. I just said I'M LOCKED OUT OF THE PHONE. See last paragraph. The linked instructions are non-operative. That's why I'm posting to see if there's another solution (other than re-flashing the phone).

Re: ARGH! Locked out of phone!!!
 

Re: theJ80

So, there's no option but to re-flash the phone? Doesn't that essentially wipe the phone and all the data not on the memory card? Isn't there no way to avoid this? Can I boot the phone from an external memory card? I have my wife'sN900 phone to use as a test case.

Re: ARGH! Locked out of phone!!!
 

http://talk.maemo.org/search.php?searchid=9956980

i think there is no other way.. try looking from the threads in the above link

Re: ARGH! Locked out of phone!!!
 

I think you can go to Nokia and and let them unlock it but don't know if they will loose your data or not.

Re: ARGH! Locked out of phone!!!
 

Sigh. O.K. I was hoping there was some well known workaround. I'm correct in assuming my data is toast if I reflash, right?

Re: ARGH! Locked out of phone!!!
 

No, if you don't reflash emmc. Your data stays if you only reflash
the rootfs.

Re: ARGH! Locked out of phone!!!
 

After the re-flash you can then use the backup you kept on your emmc to restore all of your apps. You did keep a backup?

Re: ARGH! Locked out of phone!!!
 

What this guys says. ONLY flash rootfs, your data will be fine.

Re: ARGH! Locked out of phone!!!
 

and next time learn to talk nicely to people who are helping you

Re: ARGH! Locked out of phone!!!
 

WTF?! You must be a primary school teacher or something!

Re: ARGH! Locked out of phone!!!
 

@Char: You didnt help that guy one bit and all you leave is such a stupid comment.. anyone would be desperate in a scenario like his

Re: ARGH! Locked out of phone!!!
 

There's a backup, somewhere, from a few months ago (before I upgraded to PR 1.3), but since I don't generally use the Nokia PC Suite, and I don't store anything critical on the phone (insert rant about dysfunctional aspects of phone), I don't back it up regularly. Most of my contacts are stored in Outlook, so it's no tragedy. It's all nice to have stuff. There's probably a backup on the MMC card from that period as well.

Yeah, yeah, I know, backup regularly. Whatever. Who expects to be locked out of their phone? I've had one cell phone lost or stolen in 15 years, and none die completely (and the one that was stolen was a Sidekick, so I lost no data in the process). If it was my own stupidity, it would be different, but I did nothing but answer the phone and then put it down. Who the hell designs an interface that can enable you to activate a lock without conscious interaction?

I guess the same people who design a phone interface that regularly results in your butt re-arranging and deselecting icons from your desktop.

OMG. Damn, I love subconscious system administration. I just figured out what passcode I put on the system months ago before I upgraded to PR 1.3. Took me five minutes, after spending way longer than that trying to guess it.

Guess I'll back up the phone now. :)

Re: ARGH! Locked out of phone!!!
 

... it's my impression that a large chunk of the data is stored on the rootfs. Data that's on the EMMC should be retrievable by just pulling the MMC and plugging it in elsewhere, right?

Re: ARGH! Locked out of phone!!!
 

eMMC is the internal ~32 gig memory..what you are thinking of is probably the microSD

Re: ARGH! Locked out of phone!!!
 

I love a happy ending:)

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I do too. ... and thanks for the advice, everyone. Hopefully this will help the next person. Knowing that the rootfs can be reflashed without loss of data is certainly useful information and would have made the whole situation less stressful.

Re: ARGH! Locked out of phone!!!
 

Did it work then? Did you get it back on without losing your stuff?