[maemo-developers] Nokia flasher parameters/boot sequence repair

[From: Andrew Daviel]

Yesterday I managed to lock myself out of my N810, from user space, by
adding a couple of lines to /home/user/.profile:

if [ -x /usr/bin/xmodmap -a -s /etc/X11/Xmodmap ] ; then
   /usr/bin/xmodmap /etc/X11/Xmodmap
fi

I still don't understand what's wrong with that, or even if there is 
something wrong, why it should lock the system. On my desktop, it
works OK, and if I make a mistake, it prints an error message.
(if I add an "exit" to .profile, that does prevent login ..)
(-s should be -r BTW)

Anyhow, when this happens, I can't get into the system. sshd is not yet 
started, and the system is being rebooted by either the watchdog or the 
lifeguard, so it keeps rebooting with the blue progress bar about 2/3 the 
way across, then starting over.
If I use the flasher to disable these timers, it just hangs.

If I screw up an init sequence on Fedora, I pass "init=/bin/sh" to the 
kernel and get a root prompt on boot, bypassing init, rc.d etc.
Failing that, I can boot a CD and fix things.

So I tried using the flasher viz.
# ./flasher-3.0 -b init=/bin/busybox

Which failed to work. As did "flasher-3.0 -b rm /home/user/profile"

Re-flashing the whole FIASCO image worked (yay!) but of course I lose all 
my customization and I haven't yet got a painless restore procedure.

Is there anything less drastic than a complete re-flash ? Any equivalent 
to rescue mode ?


-- 
Andrew Daviel, TRIUMF, Canada
Tel. +1 (604) 222-7376  (Pacific Time)
Network Security Manager