I accidentally corrupt the swap partition /dev/mmcblk0p3. I mispelled a dd command and it start writing there instead of dev/mmcblk1p3 where intended. Bottom line the phone does boot, and hildon is working. but basically i cant run anything else, without an error of out of memory and crashes that eventually crash the OS. Not even xterm. I suspect the either the partition table of the mmcblk0 or the /dev/mmcblk0p3 is corrupted in some way that does not allow the use of the swap. Can anyone tell way of fix this with out a complete reflash of the eMMC? Or a way to recover the files of the /home?

Thanks in advance.

Ezmendriz

It might be possible to fix it with sfdisk, but it's not for the faint of heart:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1192598

Otherwise you might want to look at backing up (with backupmenu or rsync, look for an rsync tutorial by me), reflash the eMMC, and restore.

Edit: Here's an idea. As soon as your N900 boots, open a terminal and run as root "swapoff /dev/mmcblk0p3". That should dismount the damaged swap partition before anything is loaded into it (Maemo seems to boot with zero swap usage). That will then make it easier for you to work on it. Just do things Apple style - 1 app at a time

Oh wait, I see you say not even Xterm runs...not even if you launch with Ctrl-Shift-X?

Do you happen to have ssh running on the phone and be able to go online? If you manage to ssh into your phone try the following as root:

ah good idea I forgot about mkswap

That work, I issue a reboot just to be sure. At the end the swap was off, causing all kinds of trouble. After the makeswap and swapon, the applications start s to work again.

Thanks a Lot!!!

Ezmendriz