I've not seen this before and I'm hoping someone here has and can shed some light on the problem.

N800 boots *very* slowly in normal use. (> 5 minutes) Once it is up and running it acts normally.

When I try to boot it with USB connected and Home key pushed, I get the Nokia screen with the USB symbol in the upper right corner, but it never goes any further. Thus I can't update it.

Any suggestions?

Is this accurate? The hardware watchdog will usually step in and force a reboot if things are taking that long.

Well, booting to the Nokia screen with a USB symbol in the upper right corner when the Home button is held while powering up is exactly what it should do. Did you activate the flasher on the computer side?

Yes, this *one* N800 does this. I have 3 here and the other 2 boot in under a minute. I've taken all the cards out of it but that had no effect on boot time. This seems to imply that it's not entirely "hung" but something is taking its time during the boot process. (Thus my desire to reflash it.)

I had not tried the Linux-based flasher yet, only the Windows-based software updater. The latter, btw, never "sees" this N800. Neither does windows go through its usual i-found-a-device routine.

Installing the latest flasher is my next step...my downloads are not completing today either....grrr...holidays...

Does it even see the device on the USB bus (no idea how to check this on Windows)? If not, I'd say it's deffective and needs to be replaced/repaired.

Is this a new problem on this device, or something that's always happened?

The device manager (start->run, devmgmt.msc ->OK) doesn't show the device.

This started happening after loaning it out to a software developer at another company who needed to get an app ported. He never saw it as a problem, just annoying slow to boot.

The strange thing is that when the device is running normally, it can be connected to the USB port, memory cards accessed, etc.

Maybe this is a very unique case so preserving it isn't interesting. I'll try flasher on it.

Thanks for the help.

Very weird. I don't have anymore to add in the way of help. Perhaps somebody with a bit more knowledge might be able to step in with some more help.

If you can't resolve it normally, either send it back to Nokia for repair. If that's not an option, you could always fashion your own serial cable to cold-flash it.

Grab a copy of Ubuntu, boot it live, grab flasher-3.0 and give that a shot. (You'll have to put the image file on a USB key or something). Sounds like your N800 is hooped, and I strongly suspect the developer "tinkered" with it. This is why you don't give them admin access in the workplace unless they absolutely need it. (Oh I feel the flames heating up.)