Notices

The camera on my N900 worked great for a few weeks, but now whenever I try to take pictures or take a movie, the camera application closes immediately and on the desktop, a cryptic message pops up... "Operation Failed". Its been doing this for the past week now, I have no idea what is the problem. Anyone have any clues or suggestions on how to get the camera to work again or stop crashing?

I got that "Operation Failed" message once. I switched off the phone then switched it on again, and I haven't seen that message since.

I also ran into this problem every now and then in the past, and restarting the phone used to work... but this last time restarting the phone did NOT help, and the camera was completely useless.

I found a solution - thanks to the folks at Qik who suggested it might be a hard drive problem. I had to run a scan disk on the memory through my windows machine. After I ran it and fixed the errors, the camera worked again.

These are the steps I took to fix the problem:

1) Connect your phone to a Windows machine through USB.

2) Set the phone to "USB Mass Storage" mode, and wait for it to show up on windows explorer.

3) Right click on the drive and select properties. Go to Tools tab, and under error checking, select "Check Now...". Select both options (automatically fix and attempt recovery of bad sectors).

4) Click start, wait for a while.

So now I am worried. This weekend with my girlfriend, I totally missed some awesome picture taking opportunities, and I can't rely on this N900 camera because I never know when it might not work for me. I hate to have to bring a separate camera (the camera pictures look great... when it works).

Does anyone know if there is there a linux command I can run to do a scan disk/fix disk from the x-terminal? At least that way when the camera breaks, i can fix it without having to wait till i get home. My iPhone friends will laugh at me though if I have to reformat my hard drive ever time i want to take a picture.

:S

There's the fsck command. But I don't know if that would do the same thing that your Windows check did. Also, I'm pretty sure you can't run fsck on a partition that's mounted, so I don't know that you could boot into Maemo on the N900 and then run fsck on the partition that you booted from. That said, normally a Linux system would automatically run fsck at startup to look for errors. Don't know if Maemo works this way, although obviously even if it does, restarting wasn't solving your problem.

Anyway, hope that maybe helps point in a useful direction. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable can make a better suggestion and/or explanation of fsck.

you can probably use fsck with -c option

So was there really bad sectors in phone or just a corrupted filesystem (=most likely sw problem in camera sw)?
It would be bad to miss taking photos of the girlfriend

It's probably the DSP getting its knickers in a twist, reboot solves the problem.

i had this problem the first day i recieved the phone. restarting does fix the problem but its been happening quite often. did a check disk but didnt help. am i the only one woth this problem? any suggestions?

Corrupted memory card maybe?

Solved my problem.

you mean the sd card? i dont use one