I've installed a few updates that were available, namely to Modest.

Ever since that upgrade, Modest stopped working altogether and the unfortunate event of even a soft reboot has left my N800 in a reboot loop.

It'll go through the reboot process, hang a few seconds, blink the blue led three times... and restart.

I've reflashed the N800 (which was a pain because I had pretty much everything tweaked to my taste), started installing a few things, including Modest.

Same thing happened: installed the updates, and Modest immediately stopped working and threw out an error message whenever I tried to start it. Launching it from terminal just gave a "Forbidden application" (or something to the likes of that), even from root.

As I rebooted to apply my regional settings... the N800 just hangs on a reboot loop.

So, two things: if you're planning on upgrading your packages, beware. I may not be alone here, especially given the fact that I reflashed and the exact same thing happened. Secondly, has this happened to anyone else, is there something one can do (other than go through the entire remove battery-remove SD cards-pray for 18 minutes-etc-etc-etc process).

I've pretty much exhausted the possibilities here, and I'm getting desperate enough with this, as the mere prospect of reinstalling everything again is a PITA, especially given the fact how slow things work when you add a few extra repos.

Doing regular backups would seem like a good idea. A re-flash isn't actually that painful if you have a recent backup: you don't lose the contents of the memory cards and everything else should be restorable.

I ran apt-get upgrade just for fun a few times and I have had to reflash TWICE in the last 24 hours to stop perpetual rebooting. It wasn't bad, actually. I'm happy with my setup.

Hehe, join the club mate!

Can you pinpoint what caused the problem for you? I've avoided Modest and its libs for my current install, but I'd really like to use it again.

Were you using Modest as well?

I've spent a good portion of my afternoon getting things back to how they were (I tweaked themes that I hadn't backed up, installed a whole lot of apps which I hadn't backed up as well).

At least the data's safe and stored, but I lost my Full Throttle save games...

Fell into the same trap!

Really wish I could to an apt-get upgrade instead of selecting individual updates through the AppMan.

same problem here - haven't reflashed yet, I'm hoping someone has another fix - have notes from last few days that aren't backed up.

OK, if you have fanoush's initfs setup (I did, but hadn't yet cloned the OS to the MMC card), you can download the dev firmware tarball from here, untar it to the proper partition of an MMC card (whatever your device is set to boot from), and boot from that. This is a stripped-down OS, with basically only an X-term to work with, but that's enough to mount the internal filesystem, and copy everything off. Of course, it would be better still if I'd set up the dual-boot promptly in the first place!

I haven't experimented much, but you may be able to set up a chroot environment and uninstall whatever it was that caused the problem via dpkg.

I will definitely be keeping an MMC card handy with this rootfs on it for emergencies!

P.S. If you haven't yet setup fanoush's initfs, there may still be a way to accomplish this, by setting up the card, then using the flasher tool to boot from an MMC card. I haven't experimented with this, see this page for details

EDIT: chrooting does work, but I wasn't able to pull off the offending package, as I'm not sure which package it was, so I re-flashed.

Well, I can confirm it's NOT related to modest. I flashed the newest firmware (51-3), restored my home directory from the procedure above, plus the stuff from my latest backup (i.e., repositories, etc), and then ran apt-get update, apt-get upgrade. At this point, no modest-related packages were installed. I forgot to list all the packages that were updated, but libfarsight and rtcomm-related packages were among those listed. After the updates, the N800 goes into a white-screen reboot loop, again.

From this thread I suspect rtcomm is the problem.