Yeah, I'm definitely sure that slider won't ever let any sand or dust in...

When you take off the back cover the battery already fell out, there's something that might look like springs but they don't do anything.

I got my phone back from the nokia shop today, trying to flash it myself one more time before calling in a Dead On Arrival from the selling shop (14 days money back).

BUT please...

Before we have 15 pages of futilities...

How does one do a factory install???
What is this site?? http://thenokiaguide.com/2010/01/11/...sets-all-data/
What is FIASCO?
Is there some BIOS level NOKIA debugging application or do those people in the shop just use the great and amazing NokiaSuite???

The op took me back to the days i read television mag for engineers lol the story was great ha those were the days lol.
But hey go easy on the guy huh he was only telling you his story and in a very warm hearted way.

I've had mine for some time (I was a pre-order), and work in a sandy, dusty environment. No sand or dust.

On several phones I've owned the back cover is the battery. The battery in mine is quite tight, and takes a pretty good shake or a pry to pop the battery out. If yours is a little looser, well, that's build tolerances. You never need to take the back cover off anyway. The only thing in there is the battery, the SIM (which you have to take the battery out for any way) and the uSD chip, which you don't want to swap out often anyway.

If you got it back from the shop, why are you trying to flash it? Didn't they fix it? Is this a Nokia shop, or some 3rd party shop that says they handle Nokia repairs?

FIASCO is an acronym . You really need to learn to use the search function of this forum. There are literally dozens of threads in the past two days detailing how to flash the latest firmware. There's also a wiki page for how to do it. (You probably want to flash eMMC too btw.)

The link you gave also informs you how to flash the image, though they're showing you how to flash the 1.0 image, not 1.2, but the only change is the file name.

When you have an issue and don't know the answer, PLEASE for the love of all things holy, don't just post yet another thread. Try searching first using a couple keywords. Everything you needed to know was covered on the top hit doing a search for "flash image".

Which then begs the question of what on earth you're doing taking the back cover off with the battery pointing downwards. How do you even do that? I can only get the back cover off it if the battery is pointing upwards where it can't go anywhere anyway!

Yes, they are an official NOKIA Care Service Point.

They perform small repairs like swapping microphones/speakers, sell batteries and do free shipping to Finland. Anyone with a broken Nokia can go there for free (part of 2 year warranty).

Like I said... They didn't fix it because their NOKIA engineer computer doesn't recognize the phone.

I'm guessing it's because this phone definitely isn't a N97 and doesn't natively do that Nokia Suite stuff. That's why I already asked if anybody knows what kind of software they're using three times or so...

Thanks for the wiki link, I tried it again and it seems I've got a problem with bug 7433 (https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7433)

Phone stalls on trying to boot in flash mode. Without flashing eMMC it doesn't mount anything except ubi0:rootfs of 227.8 MiB.

Could I fix this on the phone itself??

PS. Since I'm flashing all evening now, I don't think of putting the back cover back on. When I need the phone to be off I take out the battery, but then I need to be carefull and keep it on a surface.

Ahh, yeah...

Got news from the NOKIA Care people...

Seems to be a common problem on N900: The eMMC isn't attached to the circuitboard very well and it stopped working on my phone.

That doesn't explain why I can't flash it, seems only pre-production models can be flashed.

So we can say one thing in contrary to popular belief:

THIS IS A HARDWARE ISSUE!!!

fyi, I got a retail version of N900 and was able to flash the eMMC and flash the firmware.

Brain damage!!!!????!!!!!????

When I take the back cover off, the battery doesn't fall out. I have to pry it out.

It's not true that only pre-production models can be flashed. This sounds like a misreading of a poorly written part of the Wiki.