After 20 months of joy, my N900 has started to act very strangely.
Basically, everything works fine, until I stop using it for a few minutes, and then it turns itself off, and the only way to re start is remove battery. This happens even when the phone is on charge, the led blinks that it's charging, but the phone turns itself off, but the led keeps blinking, even when the power cable is removed!

Any clues? It just started this yesterday.

BT

Was you doing something special with it before reboots started? Any packages updates, hardware changes?
How do you know that it really turns off and not just blanking the screen?
Can you make a video?

The phone was doing nothing when this happened. At first I assumed the battery was dead. The phone won't respond to any key presses, opening the keyboard, opening the camera, pressing on/off button etc. The only way to get it to do anything is removing the battery.

I hadn't updated anything for 6 months or so, so it's all out of the blue.

Strange. Please, install latest kernel-power (if You haven't yet) and enable framebuffer - maybe You'll be able to see, what is happening during forced "shutdown". Also, when it "goes to sleep", holding power button for 15-20 seconds, waiting a while, and trying again to turn it on doesn't work (instead of pulling battery out)?

If possible, list installed packages.

/Estel

Thanks for all the comments.

Estel : and enable framebuffer -; how do I do this?

I have my phone on at the moment, it seems if I leave it on charge and tell it to keep display on whilst charging it works ok, so something to do with the switching off of the display must be causing this error.

I wanted to try and re-flash the device, but for the last 12 months it hasn't ever connected to any PC, OVI, PC suite etc all fail to connect to it.

BT

It's a piece of code added to your /sbin/preinit, that allows you to see the state of booting through getbootstate.