Trying to resurrect dead Nokia N9
I have a Nokia N9 64GB that I've used without problems for years. Some time ago, I started noticing that the N9 was getting slower and losing battery life. This progressed until the N9 would make a "whimper" "dead battery sound" and turn off. I tried charging it but the N9 would just vibrate briefly, the charging LED would flash and then turn off. Then, it would turn itself on again, in an infinite loop. Eventually the phone would not even turn on and no vibration was exhibited and no LEDs turned on. Anyways, when I got the time to investigate the problem, I partially disassembled my N9 until I could access the battery. And, what do you know : The battery was *bloated* :). I checked it with a multimeter and it read 0 volts. So, I got a new battery for the N9 recently. After installing the new battery, the phone didn't seem to want to charge. After a while though, and after unplugging and re-plugging the N9's USB connector into my laptop, the LED lit up. It would light up dimly white, vibrate briefly, and then the LED would light up brightly for about 30 seconds or so and then blink 3 or 4 times and then turn off. After having my N9 plugged into a Plugable fast charging USB hub with a generic micro-USB to USB type A connector, and, after having turned the phone back on and off again it finally "came to life", or so I thought. The Nokia logo and a small USB icon were displayed but then, almost immediately, a screen with a caution symbol would be displayed which read "Warning! you have modified the device software" . My N9 would display this screen for a while and then turn off. I did modify the software in that I disabled Aegis and rooted my N9, but, it never threw this warning screen at me before.
I have never flashed my N9's firmware in such a way as to brick it and before it died, it was working normally. Now I'm stuck on this warning screen. I've tried multiple methods of trying to un-brick the N9 but when connected via USB to a Windows or Linux box, the N9's USB connection doesn't even show up ( eg. "sudo lsusb -v | grep -i -P '(Nokia)|(n9)'" shows nothing). I'm also considering that I was possibly using only charging USB cables and I'll test the N9 again today with a data/charge cable. My hypothesis is that the warning screen is blocking the charging code from operating and that the battery goes below 10% after a little while. But, I don't know how to get the N9 to bypass the warning screen. I have all the service manuals and schematics, and I'm hoping that might help. The reason is that if my phone is truly dead, then I can suck off the user data from the eMMC using a ribbon cable and an SD card connector. I could then swap out the system board and then re-flash the phone with my original firmware and user data and it should be back to normal. But, I *really* don't want to have to do this because it's such a PITA. Any suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, jdb2 EDIT : I said "but I think I'd have to use JTAG for the NAND flash root/boot file system", which is of course wrong for the N9 -- I was thinking of the N900. Sorry for the brain fault :P |
Re: Trying to resurrect dead Nokia N9
Sounds like highlight=malf+state+n9
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Re: Trying to resurrect dead Nokia N9
And NB this post regarding removing the malf file. This has saved me a few times without resorting to a complete reflash before my first n9 ultimately succumbed to a more fatal fate.
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Re: Trying to resurrect dead Nokia N9
Yep, the whole thing was most likely caused by repeated restarts due to the blown-up battery. And the new one being empty in the beginning, though how could that be escapes me?
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Re: Trying to resurrect dead Nokia N9
Thanks for all the replies! :D After having repeatedly trying to get the flasher tool to connect to my N9 by unplugging and re-plugging the USB cable, the flasher finally recognized my N9! :D I then was able to charge the battery past 10% using the flasher tool. After that, I let it charge for another 15 minutes or so and then I plugged it into a wall charger.
I thought I had fixed the problem with my phone, but, when I turned it on, it would only boot up with the Nokia logo in the center ( with no animation ) and a USB charging symbol towards the upper right. Then, I started getting that warning screen again. I then used the Ubiboot rescue kernel to export the N9's filesystems and that worked ( I'm on a Linux box ) but it looks like there may be some hardware level corruption in the eMMC's flash ( link to Ubiboot dmesg log file -- too long to include here ) : http://www.mediafire.com/file/yyk6fy...mesg-log-5.zip With the Ubiboot rescue kernel I was able to export the 3 partitions on my N9 as /dev/sdg1, /dev/sdg2 and /dev/sdg3 : Code:
$sudo lsblk holds a lost+found directory and the "user" directory. I have been unable to mount the "ext4de" rootfs partition as I get strange errors such as "stale file handle" when I try. After having exported the eMMC partitions via the Ubiboot rescue kernel, I tried to use dd to suck all the data ( while disregarding blocks with errors ) off of the 64GiB eMMC, but, the Ubiboot kernel, apparently, doesn't run the battery charging code so my backup operation failed at about 6GiB because the phone's battery got drained again. I'm wondering if the Nokia N9 rescue initrd and kernel have the same problem. If so, then I'll have to buy a used, say, Nokia Lumia 800 ( which one can get pretty cheap ), disassemble it and use it to charge my Nokia N9's battery. My device info is : Code:
$ sudo flasher -i Thanks, jdb2 |
Re: Trying to resurrect dead Nokia N9
Quote:
Thanks, jdb2 |
Re: Trying to resurrect dead Nokia N9
You are correct about ubiboot not charging the device. That's a problem I could not overcame at that time; there was a lot we did not know about the device and charging logic was one of the things I was unfamiliar with.
By the time I knew how to do that things had moved forward and N9 was fading into obsolency... |
Re: Trying to resurrect dead Nokia N9
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Right now, there seems to be some slight, but fixable, corruption in the rootfs partition. dumpe2fs shows that the filesystem on the partition is mostly healthy, save for a few errors. When I try to mount it I either get errors such as "stale file handle" or "missing/corrupt root inode". If the superblock is corrupt, then I have several backups in the filesystem, which I hope bodes well for recovering the rootfs. Running dumpe2fs on the rootfs partition shows : Code:
$ sudo dumpe2fs /dev/sdg2 | grep -i backup Code:
$ sudo dumpe2fs -h /dev/sdg2 | grep -i super Code:
$ sudo dumpe2fs -h /dev/sdg2 Here is a link to the full dumpe2fs output : http://www.mediafire.com/file/36gj9v...log-4.zip/file I'm hoping that if I can recover most of the sectors from the eMMC with ddrescue then I'll be able to fix the fs corruption errors and/or restore the superblock. I can then wipe the eMMC using the flasher tool and then mark bad blocks and then, hopefully, copy all the partitions back. Any opinions or advice as to the rootfs fs corruption issue would be appreciated :) All I need to do now is charge the N9 with the flasher tool again, then let it trickle charge for about an hour and then run ddrescue after having booted into Ubiboot :) Thanks, jdb2 |
Re: Trying to resurrect dead Nokia N9
Well, after charging my N9 with the flasher tool and then letting it trickle charge for at least 12 hours, I loaded the Ubiboot rescue kernel into it. I then ran ddrescue 3 times having to recharge the N9 after each recovery so that I could perform smaller, slower sector reads with more retries.
I've completely recovered the FAT32 "MyDocs" partition, apparently with no errors, but my rootfs ext4 partition seems to be extremely corrupted. I'm no ext4 expert and I've been trying to use my backup superblocks but I'm not sure if the superblock position is relative to the eMMC device's starting address or the partition's starting address. Also, I don't know if the superblock positions are in units of the filesystem block size ( 4096 bytes ), the logical block size ( which is 512 bytes ) or the flash erase block size, which is 64KiB. When I try to mount the rootfs partition, I get a "stale file handle" failure. When I'm running the Ubiboot rescue kernel, I can see 3 exported filesystems complete with labels, UUIDs and fs types. But, when I image the eMMC using ddrescue my rootfs is marked as empty space. Somehow, I need to get more direct access to the eMMC, especially since ddrescue's minimum error skip size is 64KiB, which is the size of a flash erase block, IIRC. I may have to use a JTAG to USB interface, but I'd rather have that as a last resort. Does anyone have any ideas? Thanks, jdb2 |
Re: Trying to resurrect dead Nokia N9
Does anyone have the datasheet for the 64GiB eMMC? The only reference I could find to "JTAG" in the schematics were connections on the OMAP processor. I think that the part number for the eMMC is either "KLMCG8GE4A-A00x" or "KLMCG8GE2A-A00x" and I believe it was manufactured by Samsung. The schematics just list the chip contacts that are connected to the OMAP, with no mention of the JTAG connections or what other NC lines are used for.
Thanks, jdb2 |
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