Device rebooting continuously
 

I had a very unpleasant experience this morning. I had to reflash the device to get it working again. This is what happened...

I turned off the device last night before I went to sleep. (Normally I leave the device on standby...) This morning I wanted to power up the device before making breakfast. I opened the cover a little and pushed the power button to turn on the device. After the backlight is on and the device starts to boot, I closed the cover. I noticed that the backlight does not turn off immediately, but only after a few seconds. I wanted to make sure that the device was booting so I opened the cover again. The backlight only turn on after a few seconds. The nokia logo was there. The progress bar starts running, but after some time the progress bar resets and starts again. After a few seconds the nokia logo is moved to the top left corner of the screen?? It looks like the device has crashed. The screen then flashes and the boot sequence starts all over again. This time also, the nokia logo end up moved to the top left corner of the screen and the device reboots.

I tried turning off the device by holding the power button, but the device won't turn off. The only way was to remove the battery. When I start the device it went to the same reboot sequence :(

So, the only way to get it to work was to do a reflash. Fortunately I did a backup two days ago so I didn't loose too much data, but it's still very annoying.

I suspect that closing and opening the cover during boot caused the problem, but I'm not sure. I'll try and see if I can reproduce the problem when I get home this evening.

Well, the only positive thing is the I had a chance to test my backup and restore scripts...

If you can reproduce the problem, you should go and report it to the maemo.org bugzilla https://maemo.org/bugzilla/ .

I have had similar symptoms with my device. It once powered up by itseft in the middle of the night. I woke up because of the startup tone and when I opened the cover it begun to shut down also by itself. This happened at least twice.

Could this be just software problem, my version is dated in november so there is a newer version available?

... I've never tried to put the cover back on during a boot, to me cover on means 'suspend'... and that's not what you want to do during a boot (still, you figured it'd disable the magnetic switch or something).

I've had two instances where an extremely faint Nokia logo would appear on the screen and the device would be unresponsive until the battery was popped and replaced.

I've had this endless reboot problem happen to me several times now. It always requires a reflash. Bear in mind that I've been hacking the OS quite a bit and install some non-standard software, so I'm not too surprised if I screw it up occasionally.

That's why I am very keen to get a install / restore setup for the complete file system. Right now, I'm experimenting with using rsync to copy everything to my mmc.

Henry: how did the restore work? If it DID work, then perhaps you could enlighten us about your methods?

Anyone else gotten a complete backup to mmc to work?

I couldn't repeat the reboot problem. But while testing, I did encounter some other strange things like backlight not working after removal of cover. Also, in a few cases the nokia logo was shown on a black background. But at least no continuous reboot. So I think it was just back luck this morning.

I still need to fine tune my backup and restore strategy. No automatic or full restore yet. I just restore the directories I need (like ~/.ssh ~/.gpe ~/.profile) by hand.

Here is what I do for backup:
1. Use the device's backup program to backup all settings to MMC.
2. Use rsync (tunnelled trough ssh) to backup the following directories to a linux machine (a Linksys NSLU2 running OpenSlug)
- /home/user
- /var/lib/install/etc
- /media

This way I not only backup the device but also the MMC card. Also, since the backup is to linux file system, file permissions are preserved.

My SSH/rsync strategy is here:

http://bleb.org/software/770/#sync

It backs up:

• system & application configuration (/var/lib/gconf and some stuff in /etc/bluetooth)
• installed apps (/var/lib/install)
• home directory (excluding Opera cache, the sample MP3 & video files, some Macromedia cache stuff)

So it's more comprehesive than the built-in backup & restore.

Comments welcome.

Cheers,

Andrew