Hello,

I recently purchased a black N9, 64GB in good condition. Its running 10.2011.34-1.340.01.1_PR_340, which I think is Meego PR 1.2. I'm unable to get the phone into Developer Mode, because it can't talk to the long-defunct Nokia servers, and I can't run terminal commands on it as it doesn't have a terminal app, nor is ssh enabled.

My other N9 is running PR 1.3 and I'm happy with how the software and apps work, but its battery is bad, the screen is aging, and the SIM card tray spring prevents reading the SIM card.

Would it be possible for me to use dd to simply copy the contents of my old N9 to my recently purchased on, thus upgrading its software?

Well, the answer is both yes and no

Firstly, you say you cannot flash the device so how are you planning to get to rescue mode to be able to copy the filesystems? And if you are using dd you'd need to have the same partition layout in both devices. (and you did not state if the old one is 16G or 64G...)
Hence using tar is better if you want to do the copying.
Note though that bot need to be running exactly the same SW version if you do that, since by copying data from one device to another you can only copy the OS files and not CMT.

I'd rather suggest you flash your device normally and then copy what you need from home partition.
(so what's the problem with flashing anyway, you did not tell what goes wrong with it?)

Not sure if n9repomirror works with that FW version, but you can try

https://openrepos.net/content/ancelad/n9-repomirror

Find a newer version (PR340 or higher) here if you want to flash

https://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=96401

That n9-repomirror did the trick. Once my repos were fixed and not pointing at void left by Nokia's long-gone servers, I was able to switch developer mode on.

As far as flashing to PR1.3, I realized that my error before was I hadn't followed the instructions exactly in the how-to-flash thread (https://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=82693): I hadn't turned the N9 off before trying to flash it--that's why the flasher couldn't communicate with it.

I've now flashed it with PR1.3, and have enabled developer mode. Thanks!

Just asking what flashing tool you used... now it's 2019 and WinFlash or any on my Mac won't work. Thanks!

Maybe you can try the same like with the flasher for N900 to install libusb 32bit but take the flasher from N9.
See this post: http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...0&postcount=20

Or you try a linux live image:
https://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=99093

Sweet, got it to work! Thanks!