I had my first N800 2 weeks ago, which died after an hour. After waiting another week for a new one, it's playing up a week later. It started off when I charged it, and it just wouldn't say charging like it normally would. So I tried again, still got the same. It said charging for about a minute, then would go off and register 0W on my wattmeter. When I try switching it on (plugged in or plugged out) the loading bar goes to the end (it normally stops halfway and asks for my password, but doesn't, where it freezes and keeps going in a loop. Please tell me I can resolve this without reflashing, as it has a valuble documents and hours of settings on it.

Thanks in advance.

Sounds like a dead/inferior charger. Is it the standard Nokia 890 mA AC-4U model?

If not, it may not be dead; some weaker chargers just don't deliver the current to pull it up from a fully discharged battery. I'd try to boot it by plugging a different charger into it. If that comes up to the charging screen, wait a couple hours, then try booting it up.

(I assume you're running OS2008? It doesn't sound like a canonical incident of the power-on race condition problem with OS2007, but I have to ask...)

Installing OS2008 was the first thing I did after the faults of this first tablet. And it does the same with my 6500 Slide's charger which is identical to the N800's. I really don't know what to do...

Well, I'm not real sure what to do either... can you get it to boot into flashing mode (without actually flashing, of course, just getting it up to where it has the USB logo showing...)?

If you can, then you could try setting one of the rd-mode flags to disable the watchdog reset; it may recover that way, but if the progress meter is going past the lock stage, then something seems wierd anyway, and it's not obvious that would work.

If all else fails (but still assuming it boots to flash mode fine), you could reflash the initfs with one containing dropbear, and ssh into it to recover your files at least, and hopefully recover your system.

All these options require a Linux (or other UNIX) machine, though; that's why they didn't make the first round of suggestions.

Thanks for your help Benson. I don't have a Linux machine, so I couldn't recover. I had to go with an upsetting reflash and lose my files, but at least it's working now. I'll just have to remember to do periodic backups from now on...

Well, you could have used a livecd...

Too late now, I guess, but glad you're up and running again.