someone i know had the same problem (not my phone although i have a N900 myself)
but when i opened the phone no physical apparent damage to the eMMC
the phone had some scratch on th borders of screen the fall was serious
i assumed the eMMC was gone
so i followed the procedure described by Durango
but when i activated the swap the camera complained about "not enough memory"
i desactivated and reactivated the swap to no avail i changed back the language (witch swichted strangely to italian) and rebooted
the swap was on to my surprise and strangely i remarked that the swap was on the eMMC memory witch came back from the dead
"/dev/mmcblk0p3"
some personnal files where visible on the home but MyDocs partition was no accessible nor the partition table was througth "sfdisk -l"
(i thing they were damaged by the VANILLA flash that didn't succeed )
i rebooted to try to reflash the eMMC but the same error
appeared and i lost the eMMC again
i don't know why the eMMC revived and died again
so is it a software problem ? or is it definitely a hardware one ?