[maemo-developers] Cold Flash Procedure (fails with lots of

[From: Greg S.]

On Sat, Sep 13, 2008 at 3:40 AM, Kees Jongenburger
<kees.jongenburger at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 8:29 PM, Greg S. <enimihil+maemo-dev at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I've managed to screw up the bootloader on my n810 past the point of *anything*
>> happening when I attempt to turn it on. (No white screen, no logo, no power
>> indicator, definitely no USB activity, etc.)
>
> So even setting flags using the flasher is not working right?

I definitely can't do anything over USB, it doesn't do anything when I
try and power it up, much less get to the point where I could use the
flasher to do anything.  I don't know if the cold flash is supposed to
support setting the flags, I suppose I could try it tonight when I get
home from work.

>> I have a USB TTL (3.3V) Serial adapter and have wired the Rx/Tx and Gnd as
>> specified in the documentation for the serial port under the battery, but the
>> cold flash feature of the flasher does not seem to work with that interface.  I
>> *do* get serial data out of the device when I plug it in and unplug it from the
>> charger, which occasionally triggers the flasher to do something, but from what
>> I can tell it's just noise.
> I am not aware of any documentation on how that is supposed to work,I guess
> you will need to load an agent via the serial.

Does "load an agent" refer to the "2nd" image?  As far as I can tell
that's what the cold flash is attempting to do.  If you mean something
different, I haven't come across anything talking about an "agent."
Is there something I'm missing?

>> Has anyone even gotten this far in attempting to cold flash a device?  I've
>> found a fair amount of people speculating that it can be done, but no one who's
>> attempted it.
>>
>> It's really frustrating to have something that seems to be possible so poorly
>> documented simply because no one seems to have bothered.
>>
>> If anyone has any good ideas, I'd love to get this working rather than having
>> to be at the mercy of Nokia Support every time I manage to break something
>> low-level.
>
> Overall I think it is pretty hard to FUBAR the device. What did you do
> to get that far?

I was attempting to get a dual boot set up so I could have a second OS
on the device in case of screwing up one or the other, but I'm pretty
sure something I did trashed the flash for the bootloader.  I tried to
flash it with USB with the Diablo image from Nokia, it appeared to
work, and then went black and has not turned on since...

My guess is that I managed to scribble over a bit of the flash in
charge of USB flashing, which then scribbled all over the rest of the
flash when I attempted to undo the damage by flashing it.

Greg S.