Update: Happy Endings

Finally, I've got my phone to boot with PR1.1!
For thread completion of the issue I had (and what I've seen others detail without solutions), my phone prior to the upgrade worked fine. I've installed .deb files and also from extras (e.g. *cough*bash*gcoreutils*etc*cough* - stuff that should be default stock on the N900 IMHO), so no whining from me that boo-hoo, the upgrade didn't work as documented in the wikis and elsewhere.

My N900 post PR1.1 flashing would display the Nokia logo screen, then show the 5 horizontal dancing dots, then show two long yellow status lights followed by a quick green status light flash (must mean something, like PC bios bootup diagnostic beeps?).

I flashed as per the flasher guide and per the firmware upgrade guide. I flashed with image 2009.42-11 and 2009.51-1 multiple times trying out several permutations of R&D mode and other flasher-3.5 options. Used both a WinXP 32bit PC and a Ubuntu v9.10 Live USB boot drive. No luck, still stuck.

Errors/Issues with flasher wiki:
does not work in WinXP or in Ubuntu; it simply displays a status and does not perform a flash write.

This cold flash causes a consistent fatal application error in both WinXP and Ubuntu as long as the "-c" option is used.

The HW revision can NOT be found on the back of the device under the battery! Flasher-3.5 already listed it as type "2101", so I used that while attempting the cold flash command.

Should I change the wiki to reflect these issues?

The solution to my issue was to follow the Flashing the eMMC in the N900 in the firmware update wiki. Read it carefully as ALL OF YOUR DATA WILL BE DELETED!!! Yes, EVERYTHING! According to the wiki, I should not have done this as I have a public release device. Is this the proper process to restore back to "factory settings"?
Used flasher-3.5 to install the 2009.41-1 VANILLA image, then followed up with a flash of the 2009.51-1 PR1.1 image. Restart, then another restart. Now I finally could see the Nokia hands video, then the desktop screens!

Restored 8GB worth of backups and life is good again.

A couple of really nice things I've noticed with PR1.1 coming from a N810 user:
1. Wow, the backup tool in the N900 is leaps and bounds better than the one on the N810! It backed up much more than I thought it would and wound up double backing up files that I assumed it would not pick up. Very impressive!

2. The backup tool kept an accurate and more importantly a functional list of all applications I've installed. It worked perfectly reinstalling 50+ applications with no errors or issues. Only ones not installed were CLI application installed via dpkg which is exactly what I'd expect.

3. Old compiled for Diablo apps may actually work now on the N900! Notecase v1.9.8 (open source version) now works with PR1.1 loaded whereas with 2009.42-11, the load and save dialogs did not work. This is huge for me as I have an encrypted 500+ record DB that I've slowly been migrating to KeePassX, but now I can wait for the UI issues to be fixed in KeePassX.


I hope this post can help anyone else who experiences the same upgrade issues I did.

well, i just did my eMMC thing and then updated my firmware right after and followed wiki to do everything. I already knew how to flash but followed the eMMC flasher. When it goes in standby mode it is not coming back on but i can see the white standby light... LAME