LOL thats the response, but honestly, You should know me better coderus.
First of all, I would not be giving the FULL story BEFORE contacting care if this WAS the case. !
Secondly, this IS a warning that this might (read WILL) happen to probably ALL devices out there now.

Let me add, that this was the response from stskeeps - but, let me also add stskeeps is the only one from Jolla so far who have paid attention, and is trying to aid this issue !!!

Am I happy, no!
Am I disappointed, yes!
Am I angry, yes, because this is a serious matter for every daily user of this device. If they loose the recovery they are screwed!.

Mind you, the device WAS able to boot into recovery before I went to sleep with my children.

Then, I turned it off, and the following day, turned it on - trying to start a dd recovery from my image of the NAND, like I have done so many times before.

Only, somhow during that time, being left off, until the morning when I wanted to enter recovery, it seems (so far) that the recovery partition got fu.. up, most likely the file system got shred!

I am not saying I may not have some of the 'quilt' here, but there were options for Jolla that would have prevented this.

Initially the Bootloader was unlockable by fastboot. They decided to not enable unlock option from fastboot.
This have disabled the only option left in my case, a fastboot boot boot.img to start a recovery shell and recover the device.

Thus, not allowing an unlocked bootloader is a really f... up situation for someone like me, that does changes to the core system.

So, I repeat, this is a farewell Jolla. As I will not pay 1) for repair 2) definately never ever a device like this again!

Never say never

Hope you had fun using it ...

Any chance you get involved into sailfish/silica hacks on harmattan devices or android ones ?

Because I am wondering where harmattan is going now , having something connected to jolla or other meego related project

it would make sense from a community point of view too...

"fastboot boot boot.img" should work if you had triggered unlocked bit from rescue menu. But yes, recovery would be really hard if that bit has not been set.

My bootloader was unlocked, and I keep a dd image of all partitions. However, the bootloader is re-locked after the faulty update. So, .....
No recovey
A locked bootloader
= no way out

As I stated from the very beginning when Jolla decided this 'security feature'

Afaik, unlocked bit is never cleared during updates, but you might have downgraded bootloader version to old version which ignored the unlocked bit.

In hindsight doing factory reset should always be avoided, without factory reset you would have been in bootloader which honours unlocked bit, and you could have dd'ed your backups back to device.

Probably not, I dont really like sailfish at the moment.
Most likely I will try another route to free our N9 from Nokia/Aegis, but keep harmattan, which I actually like

I rest my case!
And repeat myself, this is terrible design.

And yet, it is so easy to avoid any warranty questions, despite the fact that this is a device fault.

1) the recovery did work before I turned the device off and went to sleep, with intention of dd recovering next day.
2) next day when turning on, nope, no recovery

I believe that this may be due to the battery drained somehow during night. But it seems impossible to charge it (tried leaving it on fastboot for a day in wall charger).
I cant get a spare battery. So I cant be sure of this.

These are great btw http://www.ebay.ie/itm/300941587655

Universal external battery chargers, that work also with Jolla batteries.

There wont be any another device like N900.

would be really sad for the community. You've really brought out many great tools for us.
But I can understand you. Harmattan was / is great .... But the hardware (camera, battery, voice quality) is ****.

send the smartphone and get a repaired back. Then you know what you have to do