Bootup issue
Sunday December 11th 2005, 1:02 pm Category: Nokia 770 news

Matt Johnson wrote to maemo-users describing a boot up problem:

I got my Nokia 770 a few days ago and was having trouble connecting to Wifi. Tech support told me to shut down, remove the battery, and restart. This was annoying, but it worked. While online, I installed a few apps (xterm, ssh, GAIM, etc.), and tried setting my path in /home/user/.profile to include the install directory, as well as \bin and . I didn’t include \sbin, but my change to .profile didn’t seem to have any effect anyway.

The next day I had the wifi problem again, so I removed the battery and tried to restart. Now it fails to boot. The Nokia screen (not the hands, just the Nokia name) comes up and the progress bar starts moving, but at a certain (apparently random) point, the screen flashes, and the progress bar starts over, at the left. This continues to repeat until I remove the battery to turn it off.

I called tech support again. They said they had never heard of this problem, and told me to exchange it at CompUSA, which is difficult for obvious reasons. (Also, I’d like to find out exactly what caused this, so it doesn’t happen again. I don’t have a lot of Linux experience, but could the .profile be messing up the boot script?) I tried running the update software from the Nokia Europe website. This starts up, but fails at a certain point with “error code: ?”. There’s the flasher software, with which I could reboot r&d mode and get root (and delete .profile or at least see debug info on startup), but I don’t have a Linux box or Mac handy.

Has anyone seen this behavior? Any advice?


8 Comments so far

wifi… I have had problems with it not connecting after I have gone into offline mode, then going back into normal mode. The only way I can get it to work after that happens is to turn it off (press power, select ’switch off’) and then turn it back on again. I have never had to remove the battery to get it to turn off. Anyways, perhaps it has something to do with your battery? Return it to CompUSA is an excellent suggestion.

Comment by Derek W. 12.11.05 @ 1:29 pm

I have this exact same problem with bootup. I tried setting my 770 to RD mode when this problem first started. I could only get it working again by reflashing with the updated image from Nokia.

Comment by Calle 12.11.05 @ 3:29 pm

Exchange it at CompUSA. I never had bigger problems with Wifi. About the .profile: I’ve seen some others that suggested that this could cause problems on startup. My .profile is

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/var/lib/install/usr/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export PATH=/var/lib/install/usr/bin:$PATH

and I dont have any problems with.

-Helmar

Comment by Helmar 12.11.05 @ 11:52 pm

I think your battery is the problem. It could also be the voltage regulator but I hope it’s the battery. Try to ask a fellow for another battery or, at least, buy another one from CompUsa.

db

Comment by Blas Dominique 12.12.05 @ 2:47 am

as far as not having a linux box handy, a disc bootable distro (like DSL), ar an emulator like cygwin might help

Comment by nj 12.12.05 @ 10:38 am

It looks like now that the 770 started shipping and people are actually using it there is a growing need for a central user group so that people can help each other out with issues and problems.
Dose anybody know if such a thing exists or not? and what is the URL to access it?

Comment by Tigan 12.12.05 @ 8:18 pm

Not insulting your intelligence but you did say you were unfamiliar with linux…

First, editing your .profile does not take effect until you restart (or manually run .profile). So when you edited your .profile, did you restart?

Second, when you edited your .profile did you add those directories to your path or did you replace your path? The first is good, the second is bad…

Example from my .profile
PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin
export PATH

Just a wild guess but I bet you overwrote your path variable in your .profile. And those changes did not take effect until your next reboot. When the startup process runs your .profile login script it hoses your path and the startup cannot complete.

If you’re near Houston I’ll trade a couple of hours of free tech support for the chance to play with one of these…
David

Comment by David Smoot 12.12.05 @ 9:50 pm

From maemo.org’s wiki:

Since the Application Installer places packages outside of the normal path, you can edit ~/.profile to set these paths permanently. However, incorrectly editing ~/.profile can render your 770 unbootable, requiring you to reflash your unit and lose any data stored on it.

Comment by Dusty 12.16.05 @ 12:30 am
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