It looks like I was on the right track, I had pretty much made changes to everything exactly as you said, as far as copying /home to mmcblk1p2 and editing genfstab.awk.

I didn't have the exact same code in rcS-late, but from what I remember, it was relatively close. After I had rebooted, it just hung at the 5 dot loading screen (they were moving, but it never got past that point). But I may have changed some other files too and I could've made a typo or two since I was doing all of the editing on the N900 at 4 AM :\

I can't get into this again right now because I have too much other stuff that I have to do. Restoring the phone to at least its current state is a process. After flashing, everything has to be fixed in xterm and I can't even install rootsh through the App Manager since there's "not enough memory", so I have to switch to developer mode and apt-get install it and relink the paging file on the SD card.

But, I will try it later tonight if I have time. Vielen Dank für deine Hilfe

Also durain, if I can get this working with this method, I'll post up what I did differently from the Nokia forums post, in order to add the ext3 partition etc, so that we can try to get you moving in that direction. I would definitely buy a larger micro SD card though, to be safe. I might end up having to make another partition still, I'm not sure, and I'm worried I might start running out.

I've been thinking about ordering a 16 GB card.. 8 GB will probably be fine, but I like excuses to buy new toys anyway. 8 GB cards are relatively cheap nowadays anyway.

I've been checking out youtube videos of people repairing BGA-mounted devices (an example, if anyone here is familiar with it, is the XBox 360's processor, which develops solder faults and gives the "red ring of death"). With the proper equipment, it doesn't seem terribly hard.. I might ask around the university here to see if anyone has proper soldering facilities for this kind of stuff. At best, I'd be able to remount the chip (assuming hasn't shorted) and I'd have to replace the keyboard "pad" (not the buttons) on the other side of the board. At worst, I'll have a melted N900 and I'll need a new alarm clock.

michaaa62, vielen Dank, fast alles hat gut geklappt =)

I had to made a few changes, but I now have /home mounted from the ext3 partition on my micro SD card. So, I at least have more space to install programs and caches, etc.

These were the changes I had to make:

The first time that I tried rebooting, I didn't double check the folders first. I had /mnt/home/user and /mnt/opt/opt,
which became /home/home/user and /home/opt/opt when I rebooted. So thankfully Maemo still generated a new /home/user and made it to the desktop (though some things were funky, missing icons etc). I corrected the folders to /home/user and /home/opt like they should be, and then it loaded correctly when I rebooted again.
I think I may have used "cp -a /home /mnt" instead of "cp -a /home/* /mnt", so I think that's why it copied the directory too.

Also, mmcblk1p1 doesn't mount to /home/user/MyDocs (it looks like it should from your edit of rcS-late). It still mounts to /media/mmc1, as usual.

I still didn't have any luck with editing/adding contacts, though.
I get the error:

when I try to save the contact. I thought it might be a permissions problem, but even if I chmod the addressbook and other databases to 777, the problem continues.

Instant Message windows still won't open either. I set my status to Online/Connected/whatever, I choose a person to message, and then nothing happens, it just brings me back to the last screen (conversation list or contact card).

These are the permissions for osso-abookRe your comments about the copying commands: You are right about the -x option, but you did not change the folders in the command. So please cross check the mount point for /opt to be /home/opt and that /home/opt does contain all the applications, because otherwise your rootfs could be filled in short time.

Danke, ich habe die Permissions richtig rueckgesetzt, aber es gab leider die gleicher Fehler noch.. Mist.

I'm not sure how I can see what the "Internal error" is. I can view contacts, I can view the 'edit' or 'delete' screens, then I hit "Yes" for confirmation and that's when it gives the error. I can't change them through syncing with Ovi, either (yes, the Ovi settings are correct. It only really gives the option to delete them or not, anyway, but even that doesn't work).

Re copying: I checked with df -h, everything seems to be mounted correctly (except that my FAT32 partition is not yet mounted to MyDocs, as it still automounts to /media/mmc1).

I attached my current df output, it seems that I recovered quite a bit of space on rootfs, since the application catalog caches are saved on the SD card now.

Try if binding the MyDocs work
Find the line
and add this below it

durain - I've gotten Contacts to work again. It was definitely a corrupted file or something, because after I deleted all the database files and started fresh, I can add/edit people again.

Open up Contacts, touch at the top where it says "All Contacts" or whatever and hit Export. Choose a folder on your SD card and pick a vCard format to save them as (I picked 3). Go through all 5 steps and confirm they're in the folder you chose on your SD card.

Close Contacts and open up x-term

Reboot the N900. When you open up Contacts again, it will take a few seconds (since it's recreating all of the database files/folders) and then come up empty, with maybe just your Voicemail contact saved. If the menu pops up to 'get contacts,' choose 'Import contacts,' 'Import contacts folder' and then chose the SD folder on your SD card where you saved all of the vCard files. The databases will be repopulated with clean information from those files and you should be good to go. I recommend making a fresh backup with the Backup manager, at least to save 'Communications and Calendar.'

I'll post up my details on what I did to format the SD card later.

michaaa62 - Ich habe deine neue Code noch nicht probiert, aber ich denke, dass es klappen wird.

Thank you everyone! I see here are many new things for me to try also. Been busy lately and forgot to check here as I didn't got anymore email remainders about replies here. Just wanted to say thank you both. I'll report back after when I have tried these.

Just get some local bro to re-flow the solder on the BGA...

Believe it or not 2 hours in the oven set at 180 - 200 deg C would reflow that enough to make the contacts good again. Did the same with an old 8800Ultra Superclocked graphics card once, worked a treat, but once a BGA is gone it's gone, end of really. The 8800 worked a treat for the next two months before it all went tits up again.

To be honest it looks like the BGA on that is too far gone anyways - reflow may cause shorting across the balls if you got a proper liquid reflow on it.

ZIP CONTENTS UPDATED 2011.02.13 22:40 CET

I threw together a zip that should help those of us with this problem get back up and running quicker. I mainly threw it together so that I could experiment and if I had to reflash it wouldn't be such a pain in the *** lol. But it should be helpful. It's a work in progress, and I take no responsibility if you brick your device. That said, I've run it (as zipped) on my N900 with no ill side effects.

emmcworkaround.zip
2011.02.13 02:25 CET: updated documentation with corrections
2011.02.13 22:40 CET: added information about file system creation; improved readability

READ THE READMES!