Love my little N800 but I'm getting something similar to the WSOD.

I hope it's still alive, and just an out of memory condition in the onboard memory (not the internal card) preventing it from loading, as the N800 memory was getting low just before this happened. I need to try to save some data files which are (of course) unfortunately not backed up.

So, before I try reflashing it, is there was some way to get to that memory? Maybe a non-GUI boot or something? I'm not sure if I have the SSH server installed or not, I think I might have tried installing it.

Particulars:
- N800
- OS 2008 (v4.0)
- had a 2GB and followed instructions somewhere to "extend memory" onto the card so I could install more programs. Not sure if it worked, didn't seem to make much difference.

- powering on, NOKIA appears, then 2 startup screens, UFP symbols, then the LCARS PADD image. (yes, yes, I iinstalled the Star Trek theme awhile ago but when I uninstalled, it didn't remove those screens.
- then it goes white and does nothing else.
- there's no sounds, probably because I had sound turned off

- power button brings up the menu, and I can shutdown, etc
- the daily alarms I have set (with the Status Bar Clock) all come on as usually, with the Close and Snoose buttons operating normally.
- nothing else has any effect

- I tried powering up while holding down the Home key but it diesn't seem to make any difference.

Help?

Anyone? Do I need to reflash for sure?

did you try to remove the battery before restarting? also try to remove all memory cards.. i had lots of "wsods" but i just stuck with the tablet and after many reboots it usually comes out fine.. don't lose hope!

It is still alive you have just messed up the OS and it will not boot all the way, you can reflash it just fine but you will loose your data, sorry.

@lazuli yep, tried all those, including leaving it out for awhile as per one post.

@ericdkirk Sigh. Bah.

Hmmm.... but this highlights something: Most PCs can boot from CD or floppy or network etc, there should be some "safe" or recovery mode as standard, I'm thinking. CLI at least.

Do I understand correctly that to boot from SD requires a customized kernal/initfs already installed?

i.e. http://fanoush.wz.cz/maemo/#initfs or http://maemo.org/community/wiki/HowT...From_MMC_card/

Well, no but it is a bit easier to have bootmenu in initfs and already cloned system to card when this happens. Now you can prepare SD card with ext2 partition and extract rootfs.jffs2 image (from stock firmware) to it and use linux flasher to set root device to 'mmc'. Then you will boot clean firmware from mmc, install ssh, log-in and and mount internal flash.

Extracting rootfs from firmware and mounting it on linux PC was discussed here few times so maybe search gives something.

EDIT: check this http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...ad.php?t=21028

Oh! I will check that out. Thanks!

Got this followup via PM, perhaps it is better to continue here so others can join with helping or learn something
Yes, it is initfs_flash and it must be run on the tablet directly. I have fixed the README now (did it few times but the wrong name always sticks in some version :-).

If your tablet is already not booting then the script needs to be heavily modified but still it theory it is possible to do same thing on PC. But in this case it is easier to extract rootfs from firmware to mmc card and set root device to 'mmc' via Nokia linux flasher
and boot tablet with clean image first. Then it is easier to do recovery or install bootmenu directly on the device.

Extracting rootfs is described in the link you mentioned http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...ad.php?t=21028

Additionally you need to format card with ext2 filesystem. You may also re-partition it first and leave first partition as FAT16/32. This is not needed for first recovery but is preferred setup for maximum compatibility with Windows and tablet OS itself.

I'm getting there...

But I can't get the flasher to run in the GUI or in a terminal.

Ubuntu (Heron) tells me it's not an executable file, although "ls -l" says it is, and even when I force the flag on in the GUI file browser.

Anybody????