My N900 does not show the USB logo and start the flashing process. I've even tried removing and reinserting the battery while holding down the u key as suggested in some other threads, but still nothing.

I bought a secondhand phone (the only way I could afford the N900 I've been wanting since forever). I want to re-flash and reset the eMMC to factory defaults. I read the wiki, I downloaded the flasher-3.5 software, the *PR*.bin, and the *EMMC*.bin. I run Ubuntu, Lucid 10.04. I installed on a 32-bit machine, ran the software, got the prompt about waiting for device, plugged in the phone while holding down the u key, but the phone didn't show the USB logo,.

So I tried it on my usual 64-bit machine with the --force-architecture switch. Same result. I tried holding down the u key while plugging in the USB and reinserting the battery. (Actually, two of us tried it since you need four hands for that.) The phone stays dead, and I waited up to a minute several times.

So: is there any hope for me ? I should add: I don't have phone service on the N900 yet, so there's no SIM card in it. Is that perhaps causing all these problems?

Thanks for any help you folks can give me!

To be sure you do not have a USB port problem then get your device on a windows 32bit xp pc and try again following STRICTLY the guidelines from the flashing guide on this forum.

Good luck and let us know the results.

I do not think Windows would help you much.

You do not need to remove the battery. Hold the "u" key and plugin the usb-cable. Then run the flasher from the computer. Sometimes it's hard to see the usb-logo. And make sure the battery is charged. It will show a green led when it is fully charged.

Flash first the PR without the "-R" at the end. And then the Vanilla directly after with the "-R". The -R means it will restart.

Thanks for the answers. Unfortunately, I think I found out what my problem is: it's a counterfeit. I was googling some of the numbers on the under-the-battery sticker, and it turns out that "Made in Finland" and having one of the ID numbers end in -233 is a dead giveaway for a fake.



And then I found out I couldn't even open a terminal on the device, another indication of fakery.

So, the reason nothing is working is because it's not what it was sold to me as.



Now I have to try to get my money back. And start all over in the quest to get an N900! (I need one of those little icons shedding buckets of tears here!)

Holy shite how on earth did you end up with a fake !!! bad luck old chap hope it all works out for you.

I feel with you.. very sad.. very sad. If you have a picture of the phone running. It would be very easy to see if it is a fake or not.

There are services for payment on the Internet. That gives you the chance to control if the product is genuine or not before you release the money. I don't know your country but i guess you have something similar like that there too.

I ended up with a fake because even though I'm kind of a geek, I don't do much on ebay or buy Gucci on street corners.... So I didn't even realize I had to worry about that. Somebody was selling a "Nokia N900" so I thought it was a Nokia N900. Seems stupid in retrospect. Presumably, I'll be smarter next time. It was only when nothing worked right that I began wondering whether maybe I'd been sold a locked machine as unlocked. That didn't make sense, because I'm in the US and nobody here provides locked N900s with a contract, but I couldn't figure out what was wrong. So then I started searching goog for the IMEI and other numbers and found out.

Now that I know more about it, I realize that the main menu was all wrong too. It did have the Nokia-handshake welcome screen though, so they were trying . . .