I am sorry if this has been asked before but i cannot find an answer to this question anywhere.

The usb connector on my N900 is broken so i cannot connect it to any computer to perform a flash. My phone is in desparate need of one and i assumed that i could use X Terminal to perform the task.

I have the image in the MyDocs folder as RX.bin. I have treid to flash it with:

flasher -F RX.bin -f -R

but when i execute it, i recieve the message that it is waiting for a usb device.

i am probably missing something glaringly obvious; a little help would be appreciated

I think it can't been done, because when you flash it, it will clean your entire storage, so, when the storage is clean, it can't operrate anymore...

I do not think that is the case as the MyDocs folder remains intact. Unless you are also flashing the emmc.

flasher is only there to flash the kernel, of course, with USB host mode, you can actually flash one N900 from another.

But no, flashing an N900 from itself isn't possible.

You COULD, in THEORY, do it. However, thanks to Nokia leaving rather important elements of the N900 and its utilities closed source, we can't implement it even if it is possible.

Basically, the flasher utility on-board the N900 COULD, in theory, can (see next post) flash another N900 over the USB port. However, it cannot flash itself. It can flash its own kernel partition from on-board the device, so kernel reflashes are possible, but it cannot flash the whole fiasco image.

Hypothetically, it should be technically possible to read the image from the MyDocs storage and pass it on to NOLO (or whatever else does the flashing... I think it's NOLO, the built-in bootloader), while keeping all the necessary tools (i.e. kernel, and all the flashing-necessary processes/programs running) in RAM.

But flasher is closed source, doesn't currently support locally flashing fiasco images, and NOLO is closed source too, so we can't really reverse engineer that unless someone REALLY skilled in such matters has a few N900s they're willing to brick in experimenting.

You can flash one N900 from the other (tried this).

As for reversing it, the N900 isn't exactly easily brickable, I mean, write 000s to the bootloader and you can still coldflash it, and if you're testing with rootfs images only that shouldn't matter.

Of course, I doubt anyone's working on that (there was 0xFFFF for old tablets).

Wow that really sucks. That's probably why i couldnt find the answer then

Is there anyway to reset the OTA update so that it appears in the app manager again? Or any other novel way ot could be done?

you could look into the "other" usb channel on the N900

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=71414