Until today my N900 has worked perfectly since December. Today I was going to make a call, but suddenly I got only a message ribbon telling me about an internal error and that the phone app was killed.

I thought that rebooting the device (aka manually shutting down + booting) might solve the problem, but in the end it wrecked the whole thing.

So when I boot it, it starts as usual, but when it gets to the PIN code input screen, the white led lights up and it shuts down - only to start the whole process again.

What makes this really unpleasant is that I had a very long (and even more important) text that I was writing in Conboy. As far as I know, Conboy stores its data in somewhere else than MyDocs. I need to rescue it somehow. Any ideas?

And by the way: I have not enabled extras-devel, -testing or any other repos and I haven't still installed PR1.2.


tl;dr: Read the fourth chapter.

if u had installed dualboot on your N900 togheter with a simple shell environment Linux OS, i might have had some suggestions.

however im too inexperienced to suggest anything in the current situation.

apparantly the nokia flash software can access the rootfs partition so it should be theoretically possible to access the files - if some similar software "out there" can also make a dump of this partition... or if it would be possible to only partially overwrite rootfs.

maybe there is, but not that im aware of

In my best knowledge Conboy keeps notes under /home/user/.conboy directory - it is not a root file system. Root FS has no place for that stuff.

I guess you can reflash root...

i reflashed firmware after an infinite loop too, all settings contacts text etc in tact to my amazement when the phone booted up.

I thought rootfs was everything but MyDocs, which was a different partition altogether... that would have explained why USB storage mode works that way. (The only possible reasonable explanation.)

Anyway. So /home is on eMMC? And reflashing rootfs will wipe my installed software and all that? Just to be sure.

Hmm, white LED = dsme shutting down the device, could be an application failing so the lifeguard's restarting the device.

then try to boot it up, backup what you want, then reflash and disable R&D mode

/home won't be cleared after a rootfs reflash, /opt/* will.