Hi folks,

Hopefully this is not too obvious a question - if it is, please apply LART and point me towards the answer.

A few weeks ago, my n800 failed to boot. On turning on, it shows the white screen with the nokia logo in the middle, the blue bar crawls across the bottom of the screen, but instead of progressing to the desktop, it hangs at that point. It's obviously not completely hung because if I leave it, the screen saver kicks in after a while and the screen dims. If I boot with the home button held down, USB connected and charger disconnected, I see the USB logo and flasher can detect the device, so I should be able to reflash it.

I'm not honestly sure if there was anything critical on it, or whether everything I'd need is on the SD cards. However, I thought I'd ask, before reflashing the unit, whether there's a way to "reverse flash" first - in other words, to transfer the contents of the n800's flash memory to the host before transferring the new image to the flash memory. That way, I could later pick apart the old image to see what useful files I could find. I've looked through the option list for the "flasher" program, though, and haven't found anything likely-looking yet.

As another anternative, is there any other way I'd be likely to be able to boot the n800 in such a way that I could repair things? I've found mentions of serial console over USB, and of booting from SD card, but it looks like it may have been necessary to set them up before the box stopped booting, unfortunately. Anything I could try that doesn't require setting up before I knew I needed it?

FYI the box is an n800, type RX-34. Last time I flashed it was around 18 months ago, so it'll probably have a rather early release of OS2008 on it. I don't remember exactly which, unfortunately.

Any help would be very much appreciated!

I'm no pro, but its is probably too late to install anything that will save your tablet. If you are already booting from SD, you can mount it in a Linux computer and probably save some stuff. You can't mount the Flash (AFAIK).

Hopefully you made a backup.

Try a fresh battery. They're only good for 300 cycles. A bad battery can cause boot problems.

Thesandlord: No, I've been storing most of my files (but possibly not all, which is why I'd like to recover rather than reflash if possible) on SD cards, but booting from internal memory.

tgalati4: the current battery is only a couple of months old - I replaced it earlier this year because the original one was giving me rather crummy amounts of runtime. I've tried the old battery (which I'd not had any booting problems with) too - no difference.

Thanks anyway!

It may be tricky in your case, but if you can find another N800 with the same firmware version you could install bootmenu on it (but no need to flash the working N800), transfer the initfs to your PC, flash it to the broken N800 and ssh in over USB to mount the rootfs, look around and recover any important files.

Indeed - not knowing which firmware version was installed doesn't help, and I don't know anyone else with an n800 who's in a position to be able to reflash it to an old firmware version in order to help. I ended up reflashing my n800 today after convincing myself that everything important was likely on the SD cards. Thanks for your help everyone! Now to reinstall all the programs, rewrite some scripts, reenter my wifi and web passwords, etc, etc.

What about the Nokia's "Internet Tablet Software Update Wizard"

http://www.nokiausa.com/get-support-...oftware-update

Don't you think you can "factory reset" your nokia 800 with that?

Thanks for the suggestion, but (a) I don't have a copy of Windows to run that tool on, (b) I wasn't looking for a tool to reflash the n800 but to perform the reverse operation, that is, copy the n800's storage to the computer, and (c) I eventually gave up trying to recover anything and reflashed the tablet last month. Thanks anyway!

You may also want to vote for bug 2984.