Here is a puzzle. A few days ago, my N900 got really slow, even after a reboot. Then, it seemed to have fixed itself, until I realized that some things were not quite right. For example:

- The phone application is not able to keep track of calls. It always displays "No recent calls".
- Same thing for the Conversations app. It just says "No conversations".
- The "Ringing tone" went back to the default, even though in Preferences/Profiles I had a different one selected. (This was corrected after reslecting it.)

As far as I can tell, everything else seems fine. I am able to make calls and to receive them. I am able to send SMS messages and to receive them. But, I can't, for example, save a new contact from a recent call, since none are visible.

Any ideas?

I do have a system backup from June (made with backupmenu), but I would hate to have to go back to that.

From personal experience with the rtcom-eventlogger database, I would say that if it's really just corruption, and not you had the file get deleted or something, then it should be fixable.

(I figured out how to consistently fix it manually when I got those well-known issues where your messages get stuck looking like they're sending, or stop saving, because it eventually really pissed me off having no good options for fixing it that f'ing corruption of the conversations, call logs and the like are stored in the same database, so I suspect it would be doable to fix).

I don't have an 'easy' tutorial or anything for you. What I was going to do was eventually post the massive thing of notes I wrote up when I was figuring this out, then maybe post a tutorial for how to fix the database when it did the kind of corruptions that I'm used to dealing with (note, in all of my cases, the entire history doesn't just disappear). Then some day I wanted to try to write a program that would automate the fix that I nowadays to manually... But yeah, that's off in the distance by several months at least.

Anyway, the other issue is that I don't think the ring tone is stored in that database (though maybe it is, idk), so it's quite possible you have some other issue going on than just having database corruption.

What you can do for now is run
Then see if you can figure out by looking at it in a text editor what went wrong. If you're not familiar with SQL, that probably would take some time at best, or be too daunting to know where to begin at worse. If you're okay with the possibility of people reading your messages/chats/contacts information, you can give that file to someone else who may be able to fix it. I'm okay with volunteering to try, but I won't be able to get to it for a few days, plus you have no reason to trust me with whatever might be in your call/message/chat history.

That's all I got for now.

Thank you very much for that reply. Should I be root when issuing that command? I just tried it and it is going, going... no end in sight... How long should it normally take?

Hmm, it can take a minute or two with a pretty big database, but it shouldn't be taking too much time.

Running just the sqlite3 .dump on mine (printing to terminal output instead of into a file) it takes ~1 minute for me. I have 13848 'events' in the database, mostly texts and chats, few call events (calls store a bit less data per event, since they don't have any associated text).

If your database is MASSIVE (either because of legitimate use or maybe some issue caused it to get spammed with entries), then it can take longer, it really depends on its size.

What's
output? Particularly of interest is the size. Mine is 5.0M (Megabytes).

[Edit]
Oh, and no, root isn't necessary. Well, it shouldn't be anyway if the file has permissions correctly set and you're not using any other unstandard stuff like SELinux (if we even have that available, I don't think we do) to limit perms more.
[/Edit]

It may also be a corruption of filesystem. You may want to backup those files and try overwriting them by anything - if there is I/O error message, you may be sure that filesystem was messed up and you need to recover it from backup (hint: backupmenu) OR use cssu-devel's e2fsprogs to properly fsck them (you will loose that data, but you will be able to properly restore database afterwards), OR re-create OptFS from scratch (in such case, unless you have some really important data, reflash would be faster/easier).

But, it's just a guesswork - we have low amount of data and it might be, as well, what MT said, or even something totally different. You must check all those suggestions and determine the cause (feel free to ask here, if you gather more information and become unsure of interpretation - I'm subscribing this thread, MT did it too, for sure.).

/Estel

Well, no I don't think I have a disk corruption problem. I think the SQL database got corrupted, probably by a reboot or something. I found this post that seemed promising, but in my case did not work.

http://techblog.dorogin.com/2011/05/...-image-is.html

I tried following the suggestion on the last comment. I used SqliteBrowser to open the database and dump it as a new one. Some errors were reported saying that some records were not unique, but it created the file OK. The resulting file was slightly smaller than the original. I overwrote the one on the phone and rebooted. Upon reboot, my backgounds were gone. The phone booted into portrait mode but returned to landscape after opening the Programs Menu. (I first noticed his behavior after the last CSSU update so that is my prime suspect for this problem.)

Unfortunately the phone and conversation apps are still the same. I think I am just going to restore from backup. (I am going to have a coffee first, to calm my frustration.)

Honestly, it really sounds like you have more issues going on than just database corruption.

Your entire phone and conversation history disappearing could happen from el-v1.db being mangled, I think, but it is not typical when that database corrupts.

I never saw ringtone settings of any sort saved in there, which is why I mentioned it probably wasn't, but I acknowledged that maybe I missed it and it was secreted away in there, as unlikely as I think that is (as I looked pretty thoroughly through it).

But I know for a fact your backgrounds (I presume you mean desktop backgrounds) have nothing to do with the rtcom-eventlogger database. In fact, I'm pretty sure they don't have anything to do with any other databases that might be on the phone either.

The more you describe your issue, the more it seems like maybe there's something worse going on here than just corruption of the rtcom-eventlogger database.

Yes. I think have suspicions that my phone started to act funny after the last CSSU update. I am in the testing branch. Oh well, time for a restore. Maybe even a reflash. We'll see. Thanks for your interest in this thread. Sorry I couldn't provide a happy ending for others that may have similar issues in the future.

Missing background as addition to other funny things is, most of the time, mark of filesystem corruption inodes got messed up, and while you've tried to overwrite database files, you actually overwitten other files, that filesystem was pointing to (due to multiply claimed blocks, etc).

Been there, seen that - even more funny things, like some game's save suddenly containing config file of other, unrelated program, etc. If your rtcom-messaging or addresbook tried to load background image as database, no wonder, that you was unable to see any contacts

/Estel

For what it's worth, CSSU Testing itself is probably not to blame specifically (though that's always a possibility), just some bad luck and stuff leading to the right combination of innocent errors at the wrong moments or something. (Idk, I've got very little knowledge about how filesystems work.)

The point though is that it's also possible the filesystem corruption happened prior, but CSSU update just brought it out. *Shrug*

Anyway, I'm sorry I lack the knowledge and skills to have provided you with a happy ending.