So a couple of days ago I turned on my N900 it seemed to boot up fine but then.. I just get a black screen it continues to load to the desktop but I can't see it on the screen its just a load of multi coloured lines all at once?
Almost asif like if you had a cable that wasn't correctly inserted into a tv and so it wasn't receiving the signal properly and had wavy lines? (just a example)

I tried to take a picture.. however it was quite hard trying to capture it on my macbook pro's isight :/.

What I want to know is.. is my device 'bricked'?
Or is the screen broken?
I don't have a USB cable so I want to know before I go purchasing a new cable or a new phone.


As you can see by the lines to the left it sort of looks like a loose connection?

Thankyou in advance.

if your desktop is like that all the time then your graphic card is corrupted.same thing with a corrupted card on a pc.some times though a simple reflash can fix the problem so search on this forum of how to reflash your phone and see if that fixes your problem

Another example sorry for the reflection of my screen.



However sometimes it works perfectly.. its just when I use it for more than 10seconds it seems to go like that.
Loose connection to the screen?

If I'd had to place my money on something, I'd say it was faulty hardware. You have probably removed the battery and rebooted and if the suggested reflash doesn't make any difference, I don't see any other possible causes.

Did you drop your phone or applied lot of pressure before the issue happened? I saw similar symptoms with my wifes galaxy s which was dropped from 1 foot high. No scratch or dent on screen and touch functionality worked fine too, but the screen had lots of coloured lines and most of the screen was pitch black. Service guys fixed it and the diagnosis was some internal wire got divorced from its spouse.

I assume your issue may also be same.

It looks as if the ribbon cable to the screen has come loose. The fact that sometimes it is ok would also suggest it's a loose connection.

It might be worth following one of the youtube disassembly videos and reconnecting this ribbon cable.

This is quite a common fault with slide phones.

Thankyou :]
I reckon it is the cable thats come loose Im going to go get a tiny screw driver tonight :]

Thankyou!

I'm not sure if you use kernel-power, but I experienced a lot of graphical corruption when the voltages were too low. Perhaps that's something to check out before dismantling the phone.
If you can SSH to it, it's worth checking the output of dmesg for:
[ 100.487518] HWRecoveryResetSGX: SGX Hardware Recovery triggered
I was regularly getting those whilst seeing the corruption. After returning to default voltages all has been good.

Just a update, the phone seems to of perminatly fixed itself.
I used a backup I used from months ago and it just seemed to of fixed?

Weird right?
Thankyou for all your help!