Hi folks,

Hopefully this is not too obvious a question - if it is, please apply LART and point me towards the answer.

A few weeks ago, my n800 failed to boot. On turning on, it shows the white screen with the nokia logo in the middle, the blue bar crawls across the bottom of the screen, but instead of progressing to the desktop, it hangs at that point. It's obviously not completely hung because if I leave it, the screen saver kicks in after a while and the screen dims. If I boot with the home button held down, USB connected and charger disconnected, I see the USB logo and flasher can detect the device, so I should be able to reflash it.

I'm not honestly sure if there was anything critical on it, or whether everything I'd need is on the SD cards. However, I thought I'd ask, before reflashing the unit, whether there's a way to "reverse flash" first - in other words, to transfer the contents of the n800's flash memory to the host before transferring the new image to the flash memory. That way, I could later pick apart the old image to see what useful files I could find. I've looked through the option list for the "flasher" program, though, and haven't found anything likely-looking yet.

As another anternative, is there any other way I'd be likely to be able to boot the n800 in such a way that I could repair things? I've found mentions of serial console over USB, and of booting from SD card, but it looks like it may have been necessary to set them up before the box stopped booting, unfortunately. Anything I could try that doesn't require setting up before I knew I needed it?

FYI the box is an n800, type RX-34. Last time I flashed it was around 18 months ago, so it'll probably have a rather early release of OS2008 on it. I don't remember exactly which, unfortunately.

Any help would be very much appreciated!