It was killing dsme that did it for me; dsme was continually restarting something (I forget what, now) and following up the chain, I eventually killed dsme triggering the watchdog (I think). To be honest I wasn't watching the device, but working remotely from another room, so I'm not sure what happened on the screen. But as soon as I killed it, it rebooted.

Reads up on dsme..

Actually ... I'm not sure I understand how dsme differs from the standard /etc/event.d asynchronous service daemon. Does anyone have a good link to more thorough documentation?

Edit: Actually, found some here: http://wiki.maemo.org/Documentation/...ity_.28DSME.29

Interestingly, they mention thermal management. I didn't know there was any.

At your own risk. This is risky by nature!

I have put the following fragment at the beginning of mount_home() in /etc/event.d/rcS-late:

This allows the following: Make sure, the N900 auto-connects to your WLAN on power-up. Then "sudo gainroot" and "touch /etc/homeless" and "reboot". Next boot-up will proceed without the /home partition mounted. Boot-up works OK but the UI will look totally mixed up because graphics and fonts seem to be missing in this "mode". You will need to put in your lock code half-blind because the number-pad numbers are just rectangles. You can skip entering the SIM PIN.

Then, ssh in and fix things. Next boot-up will (shall) be with mounting /home again.

Again: Your own risk to use this.

I am sure I have used the root shell option of backup menu to fsck /home. After installing backupmenu just reboot with the keyboard open and press t at the bootmenu menu. - Make sure you have set a root password on your system first though, and that it doesn't have any special characters in it