It's on my "sometime-todolist", but currently I have no motivation to do it.
Keeping the rootfs on NAND and moving /home/ and /home/user/MyDocs to the sd is not installing maemo on sd.

The basic steps to do it would be the following:

1) Recompiling the kernel to support mounting from sd card. You must adjust the kernel command line to mount the rootfs from sdcard and not from NAND. This functionality must be compiled into the kernel and mustn't be outsourced to kernel modules (except one would use an initrd).
NIN's lab did it. I booted with the maemo kernel an EXT4 linux rootfs on sd. Here should be the relevant parts of the config used for that kernel:

2) Copying the rootfs to sd.
2) Editing the bootscripts (e. g. s/mmcblk0/mmcblk1/ if you want to move /home/, MyDocs too)

3) Dealing with suprises not foreseeable yet.

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 ?

Hi Durango. Thanks a lot for the post.

I followed all the steps and My N900 works fine now.
I am just having one issue and it is related with IM chat conversations. When I tap on the contact chat, nothing happens. It just comes back to the contact list but no window chat is showed up. Any ideas about it? I already make the rm –r /home/user/.osso-abook procedure with no success. I also did a reflash again but the problem is still there. The micro SD I am using is 8GB.

Thank a lot for your positively reply

any of you managed to fix the conversations problem after moving the system to emmc-less mode??

I have the same issue and still looking for a solution.
I just have a question for you, can you install new applications? I mean do you have enough space to install applications? As on my device I only have 16 mb =\

yes, I'm fine with free space
75M free on root and 1.4G on /home

check this (3rd message) to see how I got the conversation/skype problem fixed

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=83197

Holy ****! You saved my life!
My eMMC was completely detached, but your trick worked! Already made a BackupMenu-backup and transferred it to my PC. Now I am backing up MyDocs
I had to re-create one of the "balls" with a tiny peace of tin-solder, align the chip to the two markings on the PCB, and then the board (without camera and keyboard mat) got fried for 10 minutes at 200 deg. C (close to the heating element). I don't expect it to survive the next few days, but all the stored data is save now
Thanks again, this forum is awesome!

[QUOTE=durain;930693]Hi! I'm tired. Tried to do everything I could to figure out but I don't know linux so I can go only so far.

I dropped my N900 and its eMMC is broken. I want to get my phone to work with just microSD. So far I got it half-working with help from here

http://discussions.europe.nokia.com/.../751901#M17953

I have got everything else working except installing applications (I have only used the Application Manager). Camera and other normal stuff works. My pictures go my microSD. For some reason I can't add contacts anymore (now run out of space?). Maybe contacts are saved on the flash or something? There should still be free space on microSD.

I have read that applications install to /usr and /opt right? So do I need to mount those somehow to my microSD. I really don't know how to do that, I have tried the half-day to get this work.

Now what would be really sweet if I could somehow just install cleanly my Maemo to microSD and be done with it. For now I have just tried to mount those two directories to my microSD.

My microSD is 2gb. What I just found was instructions for installing Meego to microSD but it requires atleast 4gt. Not sure if this really means that I could use Meego without eMMC. Here's the link: http://wiki.meego.com/ARM/N900/Install/MMC

I have few times installed Maemo before using flashers and such. Maybe you could somehow choose the device like microSD in the phone as the target for installing? But for now I have just used maemo wiki instructions and they seem to presume you still have your eMMC intact so I can only do firmware but not the other thingie which would propably set up /home and those directories to eMMC.

I didn't find any help installing Maemo to microSD. So i'm asking here
************************************************** ********
can you please tell me more clearly how you did that procedere in this link http://discussions.europe.nokia.com/.../751901#M17953
i want know how to use my gb micro sd as i had broken emmc and nothing work on

I have also broken EMMC. Solution to use sd card instead emmc is very simple. Format your sd card on computer:
1 partition - fat32
2 partition - ext3
3 partition - swap (>500MB)
Then flash fiasco image and after first boot type this in terminal:
vi /lib/udev/mmc_id
and swap SLOT_NUM (1<>0)
reboot