Hello,

I have been using talk.maemo.org as a resource for about six months now, but I haven't really posted much. Anyway, I'd describe myself as an "intermediate power user." I have a fairly good working knowledge of xterminal, rootsh commands, and so forth as they relate specifically to the N900 (I'm not a Linux user and the N900 has been my first experience with Linux related tools/concepts, which I have enjoyed).

Anyway, this past weekend the following happened with my N900 in chronological order:

(1) February 2010 until about Friday, the 19th of November my N900 has been very stable; I have been overclocking since about May, and the only time I ever had a random reboot was when I set my frequency limits / voltage to a combination that caused a crash. Otherwise, my N900 has been 99.9% stable even overclocked to 125/1,150.

(2) A month or two ago, I installed Nitdroid and started booting into Droid and playing games like Homerun Battle 3D and Asphalt.

(3) On/around Friday, I set my kernel configuration voltage to "starving" 125/1125, which ran fine. I also overclocked my Nitdroid OS (which I had not previously done) to 1Ghz from 700mhz.

(4) On Saturday I was playing Asphalt (a fairly graphic-intense racing game) on Droid for quite a while, probably continuously for 40 minutes. I noticed that the phone was getting very hot, but stupidly generally ignored this.

(5) While playing the game hot, my N900 crashed and rebooted.

(6) After this incident, anytime I tried to boot into power kernel46, which operated fine previously, the phone would crash and reboot anywhere from immediately at the Nokia welcome graphic up to 2 minutes into the maemo desktop loading.

(7) A little while later, power kernel46 would load into the desktop and maintain for up to an hour or so, but would crash at seemingly random events; at one point, if I opened e-mail it would crash; at another, e-mail would work fine, but then if I switched from Wi-Fi to 3G data, it would crash.

(8) Despite these random crashes, the up time got longer and longer, and the phone made it over night into Sunday staying on. On Sunday, I did some testing, opened random apps, and eventually played angry birds for about 45 seconds.

(9) while playing angry birds, the phone crashed and totally powered off. When I tried to power on by holding down the power button, I would only get the "NOKIA" screen, and the LED would light up white, but the screen would go black after about 20 seconds and power off. From that time on, this was the only response I got -- I could hold down the power button, get the "NOKIA" screen for 20 seconds with the white LED light, and then it would power off.

(10) For all intents and purposes, I figured I had fried the CPU (which I knew in the back of my mind was a risk when OCing maemo/nitdroid) and figured I would have to get a new phone.

(11) I managed to use Maemo Flasher 3.5 to reinstall PR 1.3, and the phone booted into maemo desktop; from there I was able to reinstall kernel power, multi-boot, nitdroid and everything else, and the phone has been stable since yesterday without a hitch, which I am PRAYING will continue.

At any rate, obviously I am not OCing Nitdroid and keeping power kernel under 950, but I'd like to know if anyone has any experience with this kind of failure, or if anyone could shed some light on what might happened. Specifically, of course, I am interested in whether anyone knows or thinks that the stability I have experienced since last night and through today is only temporary and I might have permanently damaged my CPU.

Thanks in advance for any insight.

Sounds like either unstable voltage or memory corruption. Consider random reboots a warning sign to adjust your OC settings.

Luckily, it is near impossible to brick an n900 via software due to the many different recovery methods. Note that when I say brick, I mean the REAL definition (i.e. as useful as a BRICK).

Haha, trust me, I am all too familiar with the term as I have truly bricked phones in the past and genuinely thought that I had irretrievably damaged the CPU. Because of the degenerative nature of this experience, I thought I had toasted something CPU-related and it was just a matter of time before I wouldn't get any activity at all when holding the power button. But hopefully it was just memory corruption or improper voltage (especially since I was using 'starving' for the first time). Thanks for your input.

This is just a classic case of phone in need of flashing and how it cures things. Whenever your phone starts acting really weird, it's time to flash, and that will cure everything in 99 44/100% of the cases.

It is probably just a case of some corrupt files that occurred when you crashed, due possibly to undervolting, exactly the risk that you take. But since flashing is so easy and normally so successful, it's a risk worth taking -- but if this had happened to me, I wouldn't go back to the starving setting without some hesitation (thought I still might go back to starving anyway, just to confirm whether or not it is really the problem).

No need to beat yourself up about stupidly not reacting to overheading. The N900 is a fantastic device to test with and recovers from almost everything beautifully.

Geneven -- I'm probably not going to go back to starving, or even going to try it. I had used "ideal" previously, and didn't see a huge improvement in battery life while in "starving," which I thought was its purpose, but please correct me if this is wrong.

One question that you probably can answer is this: when I went through the flashing tutorial, it mentioned running the .bin file that wipes the eMMC memory as part of the flash process.

I didn't do this, and just flashed the PR 1.3 file which kept the files I had on the device. Is there any real advantage other than obviously starting fresh to running that eMMC .bin file to wipe your internal memory?

Also, as part of flashing the PR 1.3 .bin file, obviously, all my app icons were not there anymore, although, I am wondering -- would there be any way to access root folders that might contain a list of the apps I had installed pre-flash, and possibly the install files still being in those folders?

I have just been re-installing everything through fapman, but I would definitely like an easier way to restore to pre-flash if it is possible.

Making a backup using the built in utility will make a list of all your installed apps, which can then be restored through HAM or fapman. Typically flashing the eMMC is not necessary, usually just flashing the firmware image is sufficient.

Also try checking out Backup Menu, which will make an image of your complete filesystem to restore.

My phone is behaving more or less as described.
Just that it didnt start after OCing experiments (was 950 in Maemo and 1 Ghz in Nitroid - just to impress some applegeeks with the dualboot and standard nitroid is f slow. And it was stable that way for month. Sometimes getting warm, but nothing to special. I was more worried about the Battery.)
It started after the 1.3 upgrade i did on Friday.
Think ill have to try the Flashing. And give 1.3 a chance, because so far its not making me happy.