@biketool,

I think I may have the same problem as you. To me it looks like the USB port is not connecting properly.

But I also have the weird feeling that my Ubuntu 12.04/Laptop is doing something weird.

If I connect the N900 *without a battery* the LED light turns bright orange and I see this in syslog:

Aug 5 15:34:33 kernel: [95408.232282] hub 1-0:1.0: connect-debounce failed, port 4 disabled

This repeats a few times. If I put the battery in nothing shows up in the syslog. Oddly enough, I can actually "boot" (so to speak) without having a battery. I get the U-Boot menu, I choose Maemo5 and then Maemo begins booting (but then malfunctions because I fvcked up getbootstate).

I'll play a bit more with it. The worst that can happen is that the N900 physically dies..

Let me know and also shoot a PM to me.
I have pretty much given up on this cellphoneforever junk phone and am using the bricked N900 as the prototype and for practice making an improved touchstone inductive charger with double scud 3000mA/h battery setup.

@biketool,

At the moment I (still) see four ways to get my N900 back to life, in order to decreasing chances to pull this off:

1. Manage to have U-boot recognize my SD card. It might be a hardware problem (card reader in N900). But after reading the relevant parts of U-boot source code the whole initializing and reading of MMC/SD card seems a bit shaky (at least for my (coding) taste). But even if there were updates to U-boot I'm stuck with the version I have

2. Manage to type (by hand) the relevant U-boot commands to boot the kernel with custom command line (to bypass /sbin/preinit). This looks promising, but is still not working OK.

3. Somehow make my laptop + Ubuntu 12.04 + flasher-3.5 + USB cable + N900 + NOLO play together. Don't know what to do though.

4. Use the USB pads under the battery to make a USB connection. Although an electronic engineer by training, I'm a software guy, so I wouldn't even know where to start (except for just connecting the naked cables by hand -- it might just work .

You don't happen to have U-boot installed?

From now on I will install U-boot in all my N900s (done) and prepare flashable images for each mtd partition, and store them under MyDocs. In principle you could then re-flash from U-boot... (obviously, only when the SD card also doesn't work, otherwise it's all a lot easier..)