Hi - my phone crashed and I am now stuck in a booting loop to the Nokia logo. having great trouble connecting the N900 to the computer in USB mode in order to flash the vanilla. I have searched the forums and tried all the suggestions in Wiki for flashing. I can get into USB mode holding down the 'u' key when on the wall charger, but cannot get it to connect to the computer in USB mode. I have downloaded and reinstalled flasher 3.5 multiple times - installed and uninstalled the Nokia connectivity cable several times and restarted the computer. The flasher program sits waiting for USB device to be found. Does anyone have any suggestions or solutions as to why I can't get it into USB mode? I have tried with Win7 and Vista - neither computer has any luck.
Your help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks

try using a linux live cd and see if it works.

Thanks - I will try that - any other ideas?

This is the fastest and safest way to go.
Probably you are done before some useful howtos get posted here for windows flasher. But go for Debian or Ubuntu based because some Mandrivas and PCLinuxOSs don't work either.

Hi there, I just had the same problem and just fixed it about 5 minutes ago using a Mac computer. I tried so many times on a pc running windows xp and could not get it to work. I had a friend who works on phones, but he couldn't fix it. I tried to overclock my phone and it crashed and I thought I bricked it. It got stuck in some kind of crazy reboot loop and would not fix. I used a mac and reflashed with RX-51_2009SE_20.2010.36-2.002_PR_COMBINED_002_ARM.bin and everything started up again. Thank God it is working again.

Have a look here: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=40226

Also Here: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=45278

The only problem I ever had flashing my N900 with my Windows Vista (that's right, Vista, which got so much more flak than it deserved), is once I had it fail to use the port it had used previously for an earlier reflash. So I had to plug it in to another USB port - it installed the driver and all was good. I was a bit afraid after that that I'd literally only be able to get one use out of each usb port, but it didn't happen. From then on it almost always worked normally. The only other thing I've had to do once is skip the "start with u key pressed" stage, plug it in completely off and without u-key pressed, and then try to flash... I think. Something like that happened once, I no longer recall what caused it, but I'm pretty sure it was after I flashed a kernel image that uboot couldn't load because it was the wrong format.

Just so you know, you don't HAVE to have the u key pressed when you power it on. It is technically doable to flash without it. When the device's bootloader (Nolo) detects an in-bound flash, it handles the actual flashing, as I understand it. The u-key-pressing boot is a way to pre-set it into flashing mode just in case. It's basically a precaution on top of an already somewhat reliable process. It's a precaution that you should regularly follow, but if it's not working, you can try to flash without it, and unless something goes seriously wrong, it'll be fine.

Not sure if it would solve your device-not-found problem, though.

Turns out the bootloader was corrupted somehow. I found someone to fix that for me for $80. Nokia Care wouldn't touch it as the phone was never sold in NZ.
Anyhow - everything is working fine now and I have reflashed to the current version. Now I can't get connectivity to Ovi. Oh well. I will search the forums for a solution.