Hi folks

TL;DR: Other than Flasher 3.5 and the firmware binaries, what are the absolute minimum requirements to flash an N900 on Vista x86 (assuming the OS has never touched a Nokia in its life).

Detail: I purchased a second hand N900 off eBay and tried to flash it because the previous owner had filled it with junk, it has a few glitches with messaging and I think they have overclocked it. Although I could try and tackle all these issues individually I figured, screw it -- I'll just flash it and have a fresh install to play with.

So I run Win7 64-bit at home and decided I'd go for the safe option and flash it at work where my PC runs XP x86 SP3.

Unfortunately the flasher got to 20% and then died, the screen getting stuck on the Nokia logo and not reaching the 5 dots.

So after staying late in the office and reading help posts I saw some people had gained success trying it on a different machine. After much voodoo with my Win7 x64 at home I did manage to get the flasher to work but, again, it would only reach 20% then give up.

I tried several times with no luck.

Having read one persons phone seemed to 'fix itself' after leaving the battery disconnected for about 30 days I've decided I'll give up for now (battery is disconnected) and try at my mothers house this weekend as she is running Vista 32-bit.

I fear other Nokia drivers are interfering with the installation process. My mother's Vista box hasn't touched Nokia software in its life, shall I just install the flasher and flash as per the instructions in the wiki?

Before running the flasher should I plug the device in (whilst holding U) so the Vista can 'learn about it' and not butt its nose in mid-flash?

Should I install any Nokia software (e.g. PC suite) before starting?

Any help would be much appreciated... the nerd fun I've had with it so far has been great (when I successfully SSH'd to my web sever from my phone I almost involuntarily impregnated every fertile women in a 1mile radius).

Thanks

~Pedro

It's all in the Wiki: http://wiki.maemo.org/Updating_the_tablet_firmware

Note: Problems with Win 64 bit.

You can always download a Linux Live CD and use that...

Thanks, I did read the wiki and only used Win 7 64 (along with workarounds provided in wiki) after failing with Win XP 32.

I'll burn a live CD of Linux and try it out tonight... any particular distros to avoid? I'd probably go for Unbuntu.

ubuntu 12.04 is what you should be looking at as its the easiest you'll find...

you forget blueberries!

The most important requirements for flashing are :

a cool head

careful reading of relevant documents

a fully charged battery; this usually means the battery needs to be charged in a separate charger from the device you are flashing.

Fully charged battery is going to be an issue now that I have have had several unsuccessful flashes but I'm not going to encounter any issues assuming it has, say, 95% charge, am I?

At the risk of sounding like a noob I assuming the battery nazi approach is to discourage people from attempted flashing when in a situation where they could loose power mid-flash?

I've downloaded Ubuntu 12.04 which I'll run off a live CD, use to attempt the flashes and report back.

The bat-nazi thing is because there are countless threads like this one that went on and on until the user finally got an external charger or a friend with a device with the same battery and discovered that he didn't have the boot to three dots problem when he had a fully charged battery.

You can flash your n900 via a virtualized OS using software such as Virtualbox . Since I have W7 x64, flasher won't work. I installed Ubuntu 11.04 on a virtual machine using virtualbox and successfully flashed my n900. Virtualbox allows you to pass usb devices from the host windows machine to the virtual environment so your virtual OS sees it as a native device.

This is the best if you don't want to restart into a live cd and have potential hardware compatibility problems although today's live cd's carry a wide range of drivers such that what I just said won't happen.

All sorted now, thanks everyone. Just flashed from Ubuntu live CD and all was fine. Interestingly it did get stuck at 20% for a second but then carried on and completed the flash.

Phone is crap-free now xD (aside from the bundled amazon etc. apps *cough cough*)