I was trying, without success, to set up a simple shell alias (alias ls = '/usr/bin/gnu/ls --color=auto', in /etc/profile?). I knew it might need rebooting to activate, so I tried the phone’s Switch Off (which rebooted but didn’t activate), then “sudo shutdown now”, which apparently does nothing (is the n900’s shell a bit quirky, or do I just need to Read The Manual?), then “(sudo?) reboot”, which rebooted without activation. At one point, I was given three choices to boot: the normal, something I think was called recovery or rescue mode, and some third (I think these are from an app). I tried the second choice, and after nothing seemed to happen after about thirty seconds, I removed the battery (I suspect this was the Big Mistake, but maybe there should be a warning display for dolts).

I believe the phone worked normally for a while after that, but eventually (maybe after another reboot), it got stuck on the blinking five-dot stage, and that’s all the phone can do now: press the small on/off button on top, the white LED comes on, the bright Nokia logo shows, and then the five-dot runs back-and-forth, apparently forever (I’ve left in on for about an hour); pressing the on/off button again turns it off. For a while, briefly pressing the on/off button would pause the dots, but no longer. I don't think there is anything wrong with the batteries (except that I charge them externally).

Note that I can't connect to the phone by USB, since the USB receptacle slipped out some time ago. Am I screwed, until I can fix the USB? And once I have a USB connection, can I just copy in some corrupted files, or do I need to do a full re-flash? And if the latter, should I be able to copy out the flash drive's contents first (with dd, if nothing else)? I don't want to lose the user-contents. A sketch of possible, data-preserving steps to take would be appreciated.

I will have to learn all about flashing, but maybe that isn't necessary here.

Alternatively, is it fairly easy to transplant the flash drive into a new n900, and recover things that way?