Do anyone have the content of a fresh rootfs floating around in a form that is easy to copy to a SD card? I seems to have hosed the internal one but have the bootmenu still installed in that section so i ponder setting up SD boot. After that i may be able to get into the borked rootfs and poke around.

I did look into doing the extraction myself, but the hoop jumping is making me question my sanity.

Wow, I had a corrupted filesystem two days ago. Luckily I was able to boot to the flash filesystem, chroot to SD filesystem, enable syslog, figured out why it wouldn't boot and was able to reinstall a couple packages to fix it.

Doesn't help you now but you might want to clone to SD and avoid this situation in the future.

Are you trying to install rootfs on the SD card in a computer and then boot from it on the n800?

You should be able to get rootfs from the firmware image

I did not have a spare SD card on hand for a clone before this happened, to i pondered ordering up a big one to put in the internal slot. Sadly i just had to try installing one last app update and the JFFS2 threw a hissy fit over running out of space. And while trying to resurrect it i fully hosed it.

Anyways, there is a guide that i considered following:
https://wiki.maemo.org/Modifying_the_root_image

but i thought maybe someone had it on hand already.