Hey all ... Well I don't know whats happened to my N900 since yesterday .. The phone has gone into a constant cycle of restarts, and very rapid ones too .. The second it reaches the 'desktop', within 2 second the screen just turns off, with the led doing the fading animation (when also happens when you shutdown the phone) ... I didn't do any major changes yesterday which may have caused this .. the only thing I did was apply 2 software updates .. one was for the Calendar Home Widget and the other was for PSFreedom ..

The problem is that the phone doesn't stay in the desktop long enough for me to do any debugging ... Is there any 'safe mode' through which I can at least backup my phone's data before attempting a format ?

The only way I could force the phone to stay in 'desktop' is to take the battery out abruptly .. The next time the phone starts it goes into that initial menu where it asks you for the date/time/region, etc ... But the second you click save, it goes into desktop and BAM it restarts again ...

Any suggestions on what happening, and how can I at least save my data before formatting again ?

My first thought was that you could just flash the kernel. That would not have touched your data. Or a flash of rootfs.. that would need you to reinstall your programs but your personal files would still be there.

However.. when it takes you so far as the desktop. My guess is that there are some config or personal file that makes it reboot. It might still be enough to do the above. If it some process that starts late or it disables the program causing the problem. But when you have made the back up i would still make a complete reflash of both Combine (rootfs) and Vanilla (eMMC).

I appreciate your response here but I'm not getting exactly what you're suggesting me to do ... Can you be a little more specific ? (I don't mean to be rude :P)

Also, I do have some backups stored inside the N900 (made using N900's Backup program), but I'm afraid that if I reflash the firmware (which I've already done a few times), it might erase them, and then I would have lost all backups of my contacts .. it should be noted though that whenever I reflashed my N900's firmware before, the actual files on my N900 never got deleted .. So I just used one of the backups to restore my phone's data (contacts, etc ..)

So is there anyway I could access my phone's 32GB memory and backup the data there before reflashing the firmware ?

Then you know this will flash your rootfs (programs and system files)
And that this will flash your eMMC (MyDocs and personal files)
But if you do this.. it will only flash the kernel
By doing the first you will only touch the programs and system files. It will not touch your personal files.. and if i am correct your backups. (bad idea to have them on the n900). If you do the second it will remove your personal files.. if you do this you should remove the ending "-R" from the first and do them both. It's pretty much a clean swipe.

The last one though.. the one i was thinking of first will only swap the kernel out. This is good if something went wrong with the kernel. It will not touch your programs, system files or personal files. You would not notis anything different from before (if you didn't oc.. then you have to oc again).

Hope this was clearer for you

I am not sure.. but maybe you could use the usb-cable while you are at the locale settings after you removed the battery.

Alright, well I tried restoring only the kernel first but that didn't work .. So I had to go and format the rootfs as well .. now its working fine (no more restarts) .. restoring an order backup right now (the memory didn't get erased) .. so far so good !

Please tell me what you dit to fix the problem,

I have right now the same problem that you had.

I reflashed my N900 using the latest firmware image and a tool called 'flasher' ... you can get all the details from here:

http://wiki.maemo.org/Updating_the_tablet_firmware

sorry to pull the old thread, but my n900 did the same weeks after the update.

I found 1 small problem with the re-flashing under windows 7 and thought someone might get into the same problem.

the flasher.exe is installed under c:\program files in windows 7 and if u try to download the firmware (1.3) .bin file, u can not see .bin file after it's downloaded. if u try to download it again, it shows the bin file is there, but if u dir it, it will not show still.

i have to download the bin file into another folder (c:\temp) and then change the firmware file (.bin) to c:\temp\xxxx.bin before it will work.

just download it and change the extension to .temp later rename it as .bin

windows 7 also has problems with the flasher tool.