hi all, i want to hard reset my N900. How should i go about it?

I don't have a phone, but I have knowledge! With that:

Try these 2 things:
1) Take off the cover. Remove battery.
2) Hold the power button down until it resets.

On a n810 that's a soft reset. A hard reset would be to reflash. I don't think this has changed on the n900. I suggested some time ago that a hard reset mechanism should be built into the n900 (reflashing itself from an image in flash maybe), but it never gained traction.

I've the same problem. I tried to flash it using NSU, but it left all data and settings in phone. Is there any other way?

You cn reset the N900 by doin a re-flash using the FIASCO image and the command line flasher-3.5 tool.

I don't get it. How is everyone messing up Maemo so much in the first week of owning it?... to the point that they have to reflash the OS back to defaults? Might do you some good to stay out of the command line if you're messing it up that much.

They're all n00bs on this community. teheh

Well, it is possible there's some issue going on, I do see a lot of forum postings from folks that just have weird booting issues...but there's usually a reason for it (memory card inserted that it doesn't know how to read, or someone messed with an init script, or maybe someone did an "rm -rf" on the /etc directory). Granted some are maybe related to issues with the device/OS load from factory, but if it's self inflicted....damn, just stay out of the console prompt and save yourself some hurt.

Flash it as described in the wiki, user settings etc require flashing the eMMC card as well (see that page). Flashing this and the regular firmware will reset everything.

I tried to flash my n900 yesterday with
flasher-3.5 -F imagename -f -R
i thought it would reset my whole devices but my contacts were still there and my messages. also my usernames + passwords for several websites were still there .