Yesterday was my first day at work after sick-leave. I use my N900 as alarm clock, but when I woke up I thought I’ve slept it over. Some time later I realised that sound wasn’t working at all, no tone on call, SMS, mail and media player kept saying ‘unsupported format’ for all the music I use to listen to. What to do in such situation?

First of all don’t panic, try rebooting your phone, some services, like sound system may crash if you use your phone without reboot for long time. It didn’t help in my case.

Second thing to do is uninstalling recently installed applications, widgets, plugins, especially the ones from extras-devel and extras-testing because they may have done some changes to your system configuration or fill up your filesystem. It didn’t help me either.

Next, if you’ve made some power-user chages, try to remind yourself what have you changed and revoke the changes. I did some, this was most probably reason for my sound failure. Unfortunatelly I’m not a backup-person, I keep to promise myself that I will be soon to prevent such situations, but I’m too lazy. I think this was it, so not much to do, time to reflash…

Before reflashing try to copy everything that you have on your N900 (at least phone memory, since you can take microSD out for reflashing). You can also make backup using backup application and place it in safe place. I’ve also tried using Nokia Ovi Suite to make backup but it didn’t go up by even 1% in like 20 minutes, so I’ve done everything manually.

Finally reflashing itself, I’ve used the flasher-method, the simplest one with following parameters:
./flasher -f -R -F <image_file>
and it worked fine and it didn’t erase exactly everything, let me summarize results:

Erased data:

• Installed software and software catalogues settings
• Custom boot animation and led patterns
• Mail settings and messages (gmail account, not sure what happens with exchange)

Data left untouched:

• Data in MyDocs catalog (everything that you can view by plugging to computer) and apparently also in users home directory (with applications settings)
• Ringtones settings (but not alarm tone)
• Contacts with SMS and IM messages

This was result of reflashing from the first glance. As you can see it was not so scarry as some may think, so if your phone is not responding it’s worth try, you get almost fully functional phone. You need to adjust few things and get back to using N900 as before. And now I have possibility to discover new ways of customizing my N900, you’ll get informed soon

–

MJ