You should take your words back, you were given tons of great help.

Lets be pretty clear on one thing, even if you could manage to complete dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/mtd<0 through to 5> before the N900 borked itself, you can still cold flash it back to a working state. It is indeed a temperamental machine at times, but it is also incredibly user proof.

The only real reason you would be unable to flash would be hardware failure, though you haven't posted anything to indicate this is the case at all.

Keep trying.

[I think disappearing from thread with no explanation was rude, and am not going to change my stance on this]

It is good to know that the device is probably recoverable by someone who knows what they are doing, or that if I learn more I can possibly fix it myself, thank you I appreciate that.


However, it is not all bad. The whole journey is documented, and I expect a solution will be found soon, which will potentially help some other people in a similar position.

Although I can understand how one might doubt things like 'microsoft might be your problem' - it is actually a legitimate possibility which is why I sort of think it might be better to be more moderate and work through each issue step by step to eliminate everything until you reach the solution.

Sort of just on that but off topic a bit, trying to update firmware for Symbian in a virtual Windows machine running on a Linux host results in a quagmire of driver and USB issues on both sides of the fence, fortunately you can overcome these with a little bit of perseverance - same for the N900.

You don't really need to know a whole lot about the boot process of the N900 to be able to successfully flash it, you just need to know the failure modes you might encounter and why they might occur.

First up, get yourself a copy of the emmc and rootfs directly from Nokia, you'll need to enter your IMEI to do this - don't bother downloading tweaked firmware from anyone, get it from the original source.

(which is here) http://tablets-dev.nokia.com/nokia_N900.php

I'm not sure if you still have your N900 with you or if you've already sent it to Nokia, but if you have it, just post back when you have the original firmware files and I'll assist you from there.

Cheers.

I am sorry if I have not made this clear (please read the first post). Prior to installing robbies boot menu I had successfully flashed and I might have even cold flashed my device (i can't remember... I remember experimenting with cold-flashing, but not sure if prior to installing robbies image or after...), using flasher 3.5 under winxp with the correct images. This did not solve the problem.

At the moment the device has a flat battery, and plugging into the wall charger (removing battery with cord in/out, and various combinations etc) results in a fast reboot, holding "u"" does not hold the device in a usb ready state, or allow battery to charge.

I will most definitely appreciate your advice/input if I start to experiment with re-flashing again, but for the moment I am going to wait for details of previous repair to come through. I think a fully charged battery is going to be a requirement for me to be able to get the device to connect to pc via usb, so I will most likely have to wait for wall charger to arrive too. I think it is unlikely there will be a fix in short term, but hopefully in less than six weeks.

I will also do some more reading so I understand the basics of the relevant watchdogs that may be prompting the reboot. And also more about the device in general.

I still have 2 months of warranty left, and seeing as portagadgets did not honour their stated manufacturer warranty and get nokia to do the repair, it is an option to hold them liable for a fix. I don't want to go that way though, on the whole they have been pretty good about the whole thing.

We'll, good luck with that then. Denial is just the first step, you'll get through it :-)

here is reply from portagadgets:

this phone, customer upgraded software of this phone himself, causing
warranty to void on our side. We didn't replace any part previously,
svc ctr only reloaded the correct software again in the repair
previously.

Huge ********, cause N900 is Open Device (to be 100% precise, at least in this matter), and even Nokia Care don't try to use flashing kernel as voiding warranty. Joys of sending phone to "amators", only used to "regular" phones and rules regarding them - I bet that if You send Your phone with "I forget my lockcode problem", they would also try to solve it with reflash

My totally uneducated and impossible to verify assumption is that they flashed N900 via pins beneath battery. They probably don't even know that pins there are USB D+/D-, just without ANY kind of protection circuit, going directly to chip.

Still, this info adds to not-so-small count of people claiming that some "unfixable" problems were fixed by "?repair center" (be it Nokia Care or not) by flashing via serial pins. It *shouldn't* give different results than normal flashing, but it seems that, nevertheless, it actually *is* different.

I am re-downloading images from nokia. I have noticed that the first time i flashed i did it in the wrong order (or at least, that is what I have stated in this thread). Also there are 2 versions of emmc available at image download page, I think I researched the proper one to use but it is quite possible I made a mistake. Or that I made some other error. The flash was repoted successful by flasher 3.5, but maybe I used the wrong images or something.

Tomorrow I will clean up this thread and remove judgmental stuff from my posts, it is useless.

Funnily enough, still have no confirmation on original reason for reboot loop, it is hard for me not to blame car charger but that is not absolutely certain.

I don't want to accuse portagadgets of misleading me because I have no proof. I linked to this thread in the warranty claim, which would have notified them of the unauthorized software flashed to my phone (not to mention the alien boot display). It is quite possible they flashed my device to pr1.3 with the intention of returning to nokia if that did not fix (I did not manage to successfully flash to pr1.3 before sending the device back.) At the end of he day, they made an effort to fix the device despite having knowledge of actions I took that voided their obligation, which is pretty bloody excellent really.

Or are you saying I cannot void warranty by installing third party software? (genuine question) I assumed homebuilt kernels voided warranty.

I have asked them to specify how they did the flash, which will be icing on the cake in terms of post-sale support, for me.

Anyway, I'm having trouble articulating as always, will clarify some more things tomorrow,
chur,
mike

I have been sent this link by portagadgets in relation to the way my device was flashed, http://gsmsearch.com/faq/nokiaflasher.html
I dont have time to look at it at the moment, and probably won't for a few days, but it doesn't look like flasher3.5...

...Well, had a quick look and can't see anything that would specifically relate to an n900, have emailed portagadgets back asking to clarify, will keep thread updated as i have time...

Not going to get any more from them than that. Oh well. Ordering batteries and that now, will update thread some day in future