Yeah.. I came to the conclusion that the eMMC has become dislodged from the mainboard when I dropped the phone; it wont flash more than about 2 Mb of the emmc image without giving an error and the phone tools (apt-get install recovery-tools, then use testdisk) report read errors, missing partition tables damaged superblocks, cannot write anything to the eMMC..

As a temporary measure I've turned the microsd to doing the job the eMMC formerly did and the phone's now working for most of what I used to use it for.. Just pondering on whether to give this one to my mate who repairs electronics to see if he can fix the emmc back on, get another n900, get a 32gb class 10 memory card or just get another phone all together

It might be nice, now that I'm more confortable with the notions of partitiioning the memory card etc, to have a crack at installing nitdroid or meego from it, have a play with them but I'm not sure I have that much time to mess with a phone any more; i just want something to work and do the basics. Sad, aint it?