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Posts: 567 | Thanked: 2,965 times | Joined on Oct 2009
#2600
Looks like the USB port on my beloved N900 has finally failed. Its been flaky for a while but as of now it wont recognize the phone at all.

When I run flasher and its sitting at the "waiting for USB device" prompt and I then plug in the phone I get is a NOKIA logo on a darkened screen with a USB logo in the corner for 2 seconds. Based on what I see the device doing and what I see looking at the port physically it looks like some of the pins are making contact but others (the important ones) aren't meaning I cant get Flasher to talk to it at all.

This wouldn't be the end of the world if it wasn't for the fact that my phone is also stuck in a kernel-level boot-loop (best I could tell before the USB port gave up the ghost is that the kernel cant load any of its modules which then leads to all the userspace system daemons that need those modules not loading which leads to watchdogs kicking in and powering down/cycling the device. I do have backup-menu installed but the boot issues are low-level enough to prevent even that from being able to start up properly.(and due to not having a MicroSD card, the backup-menu backup I made earlier is trapped on my EMMC and I didn't have the chance to copy it off to my PC so I dont even have a backup)

How this happened I dont know other than possibly installing the wrong thing from either extras-devel or cssu-devel (perhaps somehow I ended up with one of the kernel update bits but didn't actually get the matching kernel flashed to the device, I do know at least one package I was messing with said something about kernel-feature-workaround or something)

I just bought a cheap crappy prepaid LG phone to keep me in communication with everyone I need to keep in contact with so now I can take a bit of time to figure out what to do next. I could try and get the USB port on my N900 fixed/replaced somehow although I know of nowhere in Brisbane that does small-size SMD-type soldering of the sort that would be needed and I dont have the tools or skills to do it myself (if its done damage to the traces on the board it will be even harder to fix), I could track down another N900 from somewhere and use that (although finding one in Australia would probably be hard and the shipping costs for one from Europe would probably be massive). Or I could just go and buy some other smartphone and move on.

Anyone with suggestions about what I should do next, feel free to post here or send me a PM...
 

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