So, I think my Wi-Fi chip died during an unfortunate water-related incident.

After the phone took a bath, plus a few hours of drying up, it would not boot properly. So I disassembled it, got rid of some stray water, and then put it back together. Now it boots and works semi-normal, but there's no network connections except 3G.

Primary symptoms:
- Wi-Fi doesn't work. Select connection only comes up with 3G.
- Bluetooth doesn't work. Bluetooth settings will not save.

Secondary symptom:
- burns through battery much faster than before.

I am assuming that it's hardware failure for sure, but I wouldn't like to give up on the phone until I've at least checked that it's not just some post-boot-trouble thingie. Thing is; i have no idea how to check that the Wi-Fi chip is indeed dead.

Is there anything I can do to diagnose it, to confirm that it is infact the chip that is b0rked? If I could confirm it to be a chip problem, I might even consider having it repaired, since it's damned hard to find a suitable N900 upgrade.

Try to activate bluetooth then post the end of the output of the dmesg command in Xterm

Send it to nokia care center.

They'd only glance at the screws for half a second before they'd say "warranty void"...

I ran dmesg before and after trying to activate bluetooth... It didn't seem to add anything. However, there's already a lot of information from before, some seems to be relevant. Having some trouble copying the info though, let me put the device in 3G mode and reinstall nano or something...

Yeah, attempting to enable bluetooth via settings doesn't change anything in the dmesg log... But I tried to do a WLan search, and that added this:

wl1251: ERROR timeout waiting for the hardware to complete initialization.

That's a good indication that it's purely hardware related, right?
Eh, after googling that message, I am less certain... Comes up with some quite different results, some firmware related.

Sorry this happened to you... I hope it can be saved.
The chip itself *might* not be damaged.

What causes damage to electronics when it gets wet is primarily electrolysis of the exposed metal parts (traces and contacts).
To prevent this (for future reference), whenever any electronic device gets wet, pull the power supply (battery) from it as fast as humanly possible and dry it thoroughly before re-applying power.

That said, there's two things that might be happening here.

The first is that one (or more) of the traces may be corroded completely away. This is extremely difficult to fix unless you are amazingly good at soldering (you'd need to be a pro with magnifying equipment).

The second is that some of the corrosion is actually bridging some of the contacts or traces. I'm hoping this is what happened here, and think it might be, since you indicate a higher than normal battery load. Hopefully, it didn't bridge across something that can cause damage to the chip due to application of voltage above spec for that connection to the chip.
If you're *extremely* careful, you can clean up the corrosion from the contacts and you might be able to save the device. I would use a stiff brush, but not a metal one as the metal may be damaging. You might be able to use some rubbing alcohol (stronger the better, like 90%+) with a swab to clean some light stuff too. Just make sure it's 100% dry before re-assembly.

As to how to disassemble it (and re-assemble later)... I can't help you there (sorry). I've only owned mine for a few days.

Thanks, I have already found / followed a good guide on disassembling. I think might be right about the corrosion bridge. I actually thought I saw something like that (and rubbed a bit at it) but that was on the connector between the screen and main unit. However, unlike that connector, the Wi-Fi chip appears to be quite small, I am not sure where I'd find anything to clean up.

And my soldering is awful. I wouldn't try on soldering anything smaller than a wire.

Hmmm... it's possible it may have water (and maybe even corrosion) underneath the chip. I hope not.
If the pin density is as high as I imagine, you might not even see the corrosion between them without a magnifying glass (unless your eyes are a lot better than mine).

The only thing you can do is to re-flash both images and start from scratch, maybe the OS has been corrupted because of electrical short and untill you do a re-flash you cannot realise if permanent damage has occured.

In any event your warranty is void due to accidental damage so unless you are insured for this your only hope is to try and re-flash, apart from that i do not suggest you solder anything, WHY? water does not make loose connections unless it is over a long period of time then corrosion sets in, do a proper wash of every component and re-assemble.

Better to do something than nothing.