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Reflash/reset my N9 losing as little as possible

Hi!

I've been having several issues with random slowdowns and freezes (application not responding) on vital and real-time things like call-ui, the screen not responding properly to touches (I touch an app to open, the phone freezes and then the Home Screen enters into Edit mode with the red Xs to uninstall apps), Messaging freezes while sending messages, the keyboard stops accepting new keypresses for several minutes, or it accepts without giving feedback and then suddenly all the letters appear on the window and the audio feedback is played for all the keys at one. I'm fed up and thought to try a reflash and start over, it's been two or three years since the last reset.

Of course, I started with the relevant wiki page.

1) First problem, there's no sources for firmware images, NaviFirm+ wants me to donate and create an account and all other sources are gone (just in case, I have 059J1V4 variant) So I can't reflash and no Open Mode, only reset. Without Open Mode, what can't I do? Is Inception still supported and working? I've never used Inception...

Edit: Well, well, after trying all kinds of versions of Navifirm and getting a cached 2013 firmware dump, and failing to make it work, I did find a place where I could download Nokia N9 firmwares. IIRC, PR1.3 is version 40.2012.21.3 and I downloaded several variants from here - I hope this link isn't a secret or anything... Also, it took me a while to find a working link for the flashing tools: thank you to coderus for mirroring the flashers.

So, just checking: I can mix my original main.bin (PR_LEGACY_001-OEM1-958) with my localized emmc.bin (PR_LEGACY_365), even though the variant number is higher on the eMMC? It won't break any certificates, or prevent flashing back to cleaner eMMCs (like the NOMAPS emmc). Right?

I'll follow these instructions on how to flash OpenMode without BigScaryWarning. Of couse, since my N9 is still closed vanilla with developer mode, I just went devel-su and did the disclaimer-cal command. I believe that I'm now ready to flash, as soon as I have some more answers.

I have Repomirror and N9QT installed right now, so I believe I can do it again, and do the rest of what's on the wiki. But I have lots of questions that I do not see answered on the Wiki:

2) Between mail accounts and thumbnails, I have to clean up the /home partition every 9 months, and it was a devil to find out that because of the thumbnails, /home was running out of inodes and that made all kinds of problems (Camera not working, feed subscriptions disappearing, messages and mails disappearing, etc.). I'd like to extend /home to 4GB before installing apps again, so:

~~2a) do I need OpenMode to repartition my N9?~~
2b) the partitioning thread is too complex for me and involves mostly creating extra partitions for Nemo, Sailfish or NITDroid. Well, I don't need that. Can someone help me with the commands to resize /home?

3) I have some apps downloaded (and paid) from the Nokia Store.
3a) If I back them up (how?)
3b) will they still run without the Store? I believe most of them should be on OpenRepos, but It's too many to check by hand.

I'd like to save my apps, go to OpenRepos and see what's there, and then complete with saved .debs, if possible. I did pay for Pinball Fantasies, but unfortunately the developer never got around to do Pinball Dreams, which was what I really wanted... :(

Edit:So, to save my apps I would have had to be running a script pulling all the apps while the Store was still up. However, a 1.3GB pack of Harmattan apps is here and Archive.org did a panic dump of the OVI store as explained here, but we can't select the N9 as the phone model :(

4) Maps + Drive - countries and voices:
Edit: If I can flash my region's eMMC with a lower firmware variant most questions below are answered, all that would remain would be to pull extra and updated maps from the link below
4a) are the Nokia servers still up to download these? (barring the SSO hack on the .conf described on the wiki)? If they're not, I see that the maps files have been uploaded to archive.org and are also available here, but they're a newer version than mine.
4b) Do I have to download the catalog for the newer version as well? My newest catalog at the moment is 00.02.50.103.
4c) What about the voices? Can they still be downloaded, where are they kept? Are they in MyDocs/cities/diskcache/voices and is it just a matter to copy back that folder?
4d) do I need the files in the MyDocs/cities/Maploader folder?
4e) will I lose my favourites? Can I back them up?

~~5) Will the backups made by the phone itself (and stored on Mydocs/.backups) still work? Do I need to recreate my Accounts beforehand or do these backups include those settings as well?~~ (answered on one of the linked posts above :D )

Any help will be most appreciated, guys. I'll edit the wiki with my experience afterwards.

Re: Reflash/reset my N9 losing as little as possible

Hi. So I tried and everything seemed to work OK, I reverted a backup made through the phone Settings, and I got my Facebook, contacts, calendar, notes, mail accounts, etc. back.

But I can't install ANY applications.

I reflashed with this commandline:

Code:

.\flasher -f -F DFL61_HARMATTAN_40.2012.21-3_PR_LEGACY_001-OEM1-958_ARM.bin -F DFL6

1_HARMATTAN_40.2012.21-3.365.1_EMMC_365.bin -k zImage-2.6.32.54-dfl61-20121301

According to the "Resurrect you N9" wiki article, this was supposed to do a flash to Open Kernel.

When I run "accli -I" (capital i, not lowercase L), I get:

Code:

Current mode: open

IMEI: etc

Credentials:

UID::root

GID::root

GRP::root

GRP::adm

GRP::dialout

GRP::pulse-access

Am I on Open Mode?

Next: I installed repomirror, installed Developer Mode and restored the backup.

When the backup offered to restore apps, all of them failed.

Then I tried to install download and install Warehouse, and it also failed. When I dropped to the shell, I got

Code:

$ devel-su

$ apt-get install warehouse_0.1.9_armel.deb

E: unable to get exclusive access to  /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (11: Resource temporarily unavailable)

E: Unable to lock the administration directory /var/lib/dpkg, is another process using it?

I'll probably try to reflash again, because this is very weird. This time, I'll probably restore before n9repomirror and developer mode

1) tried that, now developer mode fails to install
2) Will now try vanilla kernel, n9repomirror, developer, warehouse, THEN restore.
2.1) Hang on, on first boot in vanilla kernel the phone asked me for my security code. And my old code still works, what kind of magic is this? Can this be why my restore is not working? Warehouse installed OK, proceeding to restore.

Re: Reflash/reset my N9 losing as little as possible

Hi.
You should delete the lock file and try to reinstall your packages again.
Regards.

Re: Reflash/reset my N9 losing as little as possible

I did, or I think I did, it did not solve anything because it also couldn't get exclusive access to /var/lib/dpkg... I have been able to complete the restore with the vanilla kernel. Since my Nokia store apps are currently lost, I'm going through Warehouse reinstalling all that are available, before doing a new restore point, disabling the security code (that open-mode kernel does not support) and then trying again. But that's not going to be any time soon, maybe next weekend.

So, the easiest way is to read everything as I've read,
Do a backup from inside the phone,
mount MyDocs as mass storage,
copy everything out especially the .backups folder,
flash,
connect to the network,
install n9repomirror and developer (phone will restart),
install warehouse,
mount MyDocs again, copy back the .backups folder, unmount MyDocs,
go to Settings/Sync and Backup (I think)/backup, select the last restore, restore, and wait for a restart.
After the restart, the App Manager will ask if you want to restore your applications, unfortunately you can only restore one by one...