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Posts: 57 | Thanked: 2 times | Joined on Apr 2008 @ Germany
#1
hiho

My N900 seems to have a serious issue. As every night, I left it on my bed table charging (alarm was set).
Today morning I wasn't able to unlock it, then it rebooted automatically.
After the reboot all four desktop pages were completely empty, only my page with internet bookmarks showed up and disappeared continuously (as well as the carrier info). The clock/online/wifi status etc. worked, as well as all other programs (tested contacts, conky, xterminal).
After approx. 3 minutes the device crashes and reboots.

Iirc PR1.3 is installed with custom kernel settings, the device was overclocked to 950 MHz manually using kernel-power settings (it reboots with standard power settings).

Could this be a SW or a HW failure?
I think I have to flash the device, unfortunately the time it's acutally usable is too short to make a backup.
However, the flash should not affect the MyDocs-folder, right? There are still some backups in this folder.
 
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#2
Hi,

Same thing happens to me yesterday.
Do you find what is wrong? And how to solve the problem?

Peace.
 
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#3
The same thing happened to me this morning, plus...:
The n900 was on and charging for the night. This morning, I found it charged (green led) but was unable to unlock it. It looked halted, but I'm not sure. I powered it on and found the all my 3 desktops empty of any of my applet icons & widgets.

Moreover, the desktop menu bar (to repopulate the desktop) is completely unresponsive. I rebooted the n900, still the same.

I can no longer populate my desktops! Crazy thing.
 
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#4
This kind of thing tends to happen when your optfs is corrupt. Did you by any chance force power-off in the past few weeks? Long power button press, pull the battery out, battery ran out in the middle of doing something...

Your chances of recovery range from easy as pie to nigh impossible and it is hard to tell which. If you have BackupMenu or at least SSH installed then you might have a fighting chance but if not, then you are stuffed. Reflash might be your only option. Hope you have a backup. Sorry.
 

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#5
Originally Posted by pichlo View Post
This kind of thing tends to happen when your optfs is corrupt. Did you by any chance force power-off in the past few weeks? Long power button press, pull the battery out, battery ran out in the middle of doing something...

Your chances of recovery range from easy as pie to nigh impossible and it is hard to tell which. If you have BackupMenu or at least SSH installed then you might have a fighting chance but if not, then you are stuffed. Reflash might be your only option. Hope you have a backup. Sorry.
OK. Thank you for your answer!
I think I will investigate (using dpkg & aptitude) and check/reinstall every installed packages. I already quickly tried to reinstall some osso-hildon packages without success (but it was over expensive 3G). But I think I will reinstall all of the installed packages! I'm home with wifi... unlimited.
 
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#6
Careful with that - writing ANYTHING to a corrupt file system may corrupt it even more, beyond any chance of repair. I think your best bet is a full backup and reflash. Do you have any file manager installed other than the stock one? Can you open the terminal? The reason for asking is that you need to access files and directories above MyDocs, where the stock file manager can't reach.

If I were you, then depending on the extent of the damage, the only thing I would install - if not installed already - is the SSH server. Then connect to the phone from a PC via SSH and do a backup. Once done, you can try running fsck from BackupMenu but in my experience that is not going to go far, unless the damage is absolutely trivial. A better option is to connect the phone to a PC in BackupMenu mass storage mode (note this is different from "normal" mass storage mode as it exports two more partitions) and try to fsck your partitions. Or just back it up that way. You will need a Linux PC (at least a virtual one) for that.
 

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#7
Well... talking about dpkg should have been enough for you to understand I know ssh! ;-)
(And a corrupted filesystem doesn't scare me, I have nightly backups of my n900 on my server, through ssh/rsync and then rdiff-backup. At least, I prefer fixing broken systems instead of reinstalling everything from scratch.)

Two days ago, I run a script of my own on the n900 that uses debsums (from Debian Squeeze armel repo, not installable as is, but I unpacked and grabbed the executables only).
Basically, debsums just checks the presence & checksums (weak MD5...) of installed packages files. So it's only a read-only process.

But during the script execution, desktop icons reappeared and the phone & messaging notifications went back to life.

So, I can't really explain how this happened, but things are fixed now.

As a (useless?) reference, this is what I did (I'm a sudoer on the n900, if you're not, just install rootsh and type "sudo su -" it will ask for your own password):

Enable squeeze/armel Debien repo:
Code:
sudo echo "deb http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main contrib non-free" >/etc/apt/sources.list.d/squeeze.list
sudo aptitude update
Then extracted and "installed" debsums binaries in ~/bin (which is also a member of my $PATH env. variable):
Code:
cd ~/tmp && aptitude download debsums # got debsums_2.0.48+nmu3_all.deb
mkdir debsums && dpkg-deb -x debsums_2.0.48+nmu3_all.deb debsums/ && cp debsums/usr/bin/*debsums ~/bin/
Run the following little script that scans every installed package and keep a log of things that are wrong:
Code:
#!/bin/bash
mypath="$(basename "${0}")"
log_file=~/"$(date +"%Y-%m-%d")-${mypath}".log
debsums -s 2>${log_file}
Note that since nearly every packages are optyfied under the n900 (i.e., files moved from <their_initial_path> to /opt<their_initial_path>), debsums complained about every single installed file!

What I think in the end is that my /home[/opt] volume might have some electrical issue fixed by the fact it was extensively scanned. Can't imagine any other explanation. But more on this would be welcome.
 

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#8
Originally Posted by NicoLarve View Post
Well... talking about dpkg should have been enough for you to understand I know ssh! ;-)
Right you are! Sorry, didn't think straight, did I?

What I think in the end is that my /home[/opt] volume might have some electrical issue fixed by the fact it was extensively scanned. Can't imagine any other explanation. But more on this would be welcome.
That might be the case but notice that your script is in fact not read only, it writes to a log file. I would still try running fsck on your optfs, either from BackupMenu directly (not recommended in my experience) or export the partitions in mass storage mode from BackupMenu (key 'w') and fsck from a Linux machine.
 
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#9
Originally Posted by pichlo View Post
or export the partitions in mass storage mode from BackupMenu (key 'w') and fsck from a Linux machine.
OK, never heard about this option. Thanks.

On think I also tried was
Code:
sudo echo "y" >/home/forcefsck
It is meant to run fsck at boot time, but I think it didn't on the n900. If it was the case, it also should have deleted the file /home/forcefsck .
Also note that I couldn't find any mention to this in man fsck* pages... only on forums, etc.
 

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#10
Force fsck on boot was either added or removed in CSSU, don't remember which. Anyway, it is functionally the same (as it runs the same binary) as running fsck from BackupMenu. The fsck we have on our N900s is ancient and, in my experience at least, tends to break more things in an attempt to fix them, which is why I wouldn't recommend it. YMMV.
 

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