My N800 will not boot and I am going to try and reflash it. If at all possible, I would REALLY like to save a notes file before wiping my device. Is there any way to pull it off using my PC? I have tried connecting them by USB, but the PC doesn't acknowledge that the N800 is even connected. I'm not sure if this is normal for it not to appear or if it is because my device is not booting (I have it turned on, but it doesn't get past the initial Nokia logo screen). Anyone have any ideas on how to access my file?
Thank you!

Most likely you are SOL.

In the future do yourself a favor and clone the OS to a SD card so that you don't have this problem.

You might be able to flash bootmenu to the device and dd a copy of a downloaded OS2008 image to a SD card and then mount the internal FLASH/NAND partition (/dev/mtdblock4 or thereabouts) and access the old filesystem that way. But that's a longshot.

Anyone have a better idea?

I'm not sure if there is a way floating around to flash just Fanoush's bootmenu using Flasher3.5 perhaps you can just use the initfs parameter. Best to contact him.

After that there is testdisk+photorec but again a longshot.

Good luck

So, I think I have a similar problem, with similar hopes.

I have an N810 that gets stuck in a reboot loop. The batteries died while it was sitting unattended on the kitchen table, apparently with something stuck spinning in the background so it never went to sleep properly. After recharging, it boots almost to the GUI, gets stuck, and reboots. Something's gotten corrupted on the main filesystem, but I'm guessing it's mostly intact. The power button works, and I can even access the internal flash (mmc2) over USB for a bit before it dies, but not long enough to do anything useful.

The thought was to set up a dual boot from a new SD card, and use that to recover (fsck?) the main filesystem. Sort of like booting a Live Distro on a desktop. But in scouring the 'net, the only tools I've found to set up a dual boot require running a script *from* the NIT, and that clearly isn't possible at this point. Flasher 3.5 seems to be able to write the initfs (-n), but I can't find an appropriate image to use. (I've got an otherwise stock Diablo system.)

The other idea was to somehow get a copy of the main filesystem off to another computer, repair it there, and then put it back. None of the Flasher tools seem to be able to read, only write. Bummer.

Any other ideas or pointers to the appropriate image?

Thanks,

Greg.

Hi folks,

Some progress... I don't know how far your unit gets in the boot process; but perhaps this can help you.

I used the Flasher 3.5 to enable R&D mode, and then turned off all the watchdog timers. I think the one that really mattered was "no lifeguard". That kept the unit from rebooting, and allowed me to attach the NIT to my PC and copy all the files from MMC2 onto the PC. I also got a DD image of the whole thing, just in case. After unmounting it, I ran an fsck against the device (/dev/sdd for me), and it turned up clean, so that wasn't the cause of the problems.

Unfortunately, the data I need to access/fix is on the root filesystem, which I can't mount externally because it's in use. I also noticed that the unit was in off-line mode (the power button still works, and its menu comes up and operates). Enabling Normal mode allowed Wi-Fi to come up and connect to our router, and I can ping the unit, but of course, SSH is disabled (connection refused). {sigh} So close.

Still looking for a copy of an initfs, configured for dual boot... Any takers?

Greg.

Hi all,

With some essential help from Fanoush, I've got the N810 booting from SD flash, and can now go poking around to find why it won't boot normally.

Some of the key pieces to get it running:

1. use Flasher3.0 (not 3.5) option --set-root-device to set the boot device to "mmc" (this for the N810; not sure what the N800 calls it, since there are 2 slots). This gives a dual boot capability without reflashing the initfs. To put it back change the root device back to "flash".

2. With Flasher3.5, extract the root file system (rootfs.jffs2) from the complete software.bin file you get from Nokia's site. (option is --unpack)

3. You want to copy that file system onto an SD card. To do that, mount the rootfs.jffs2 on a Linux PC that supports the jffs2 compressed file system, using the loopback driver. Not all distros support this; I found that the SystemRescueCD does (http://www.sysresccd.org/).

Here's a script Fanoush provided to mount it: (create a mount point somewhere, and call the script with the path to the rootfs file, and the mount point)

if [ `id -u` != 0 ] ; then
echo "run this as root"
exit
fi
if [ $# -lt 2 ] ; then
echo $0 image.jffs2 directory
exit
fi
LOOPDEV=`losetup -f`
losetup $LOOPDEV $1 #rootfs.jffs2
modprobe block2mtd block2mtd=$LOOPDEV,131072
modprobe jffs2
modprobe mtdblock
sleep 1
[ -d $2 ] || mkdir $2
mount -t jffs2 -o ro /dev/mtdblock0 $2

4. Use tar (tar cvzf ~/archive.tar .) when in the root of the mounted file system to create a copy of the file system, including all the special files.

5. Format the SD card for EXT2 file system, using mkfs -t ext2 /dev/sdx1 (fill in your device's path). I got lucky and was able to use my crippled N810 as a USB reader, because my SD card was 8 gb and PCs can't mount it. A 2gb or less SD would have been a better approach.

6. Un-tar the archived root file system onto the SD with tar xvpzf file.tar.gz, when sitting in the root of the SD's empty directory. I got an error at the end, complaining about a corrupted date, but I see no ill effects and couldn't track down the source.

Put the SD into the Tablet, and boot!

Good luck to Krimsonqueen; I hope this helps you.

Greg.