Okay, so the N9 I’m trialling managed to spontaneously brick itself yesterday. No idea how – I wasn’t doing anything developer-ish with it, just treating it as a black box phone, and it happened while driving and the phone was locked and in my pocket at the time. It was working when I got in the car, and when I got to the range, all I had was the “Device is malfunctioning” screen. Resetting it (by pressing the power key for 8 seconds) did nothing. So I moved the SIM back to my n900 and started looking for ways to un-brick it.
Took a little while to figure it all out and find all the bits and pieces, but here’s how I did it:
- Download and install the maemo firmware flasher from here, at least version 3.12 (the older 3.5 version won’t work on the N9)
- Download the N9 firmware binary image using NaviFirm+. Here’s the (warning, 1.1 Gb!) file in case you don’t want to install NaviFirm+.
- sudo flasher -F DFL61_HARMATTAN_10.2011.34-1_PR_LEGACY_001-OEM1-958_ARM.bin -f -c
And done. All back up and working again. Simple once you have the bits and bobs.
Hope it helps someone…
