ARM/N900/Recover From Drained Battery

Revision as of 10:22, 17 March 2011

Warning: This page is still under review

You suspect you have drained your battery

You see one or more of the following symptoms:

• Device may be completely unresponsive with no signs of life
• MeeGo or Maemo fail to boot up. The point of failure is random or attempts keep getting shorter
• Battery voltage may be 3.0-3.3V (you may know how to measure this)

Your best choice for recovering the battery is to boot Maemo 5 and let it handle recharging. How to do that depends on how MeeGo was installed into your device:

In case you have a working dualboot configuration between Maemo 5 PR1.3 and MeeGo

1. Power down
2. Remove MeeGo SD card
3. Connect Nokia wall charger
4. Wait for 30min to give device time to recharge
5. The device will show amber status led until it boots to Maemo which will handle the rest of the charging.

In case you have flashed the MeeGo kernel into N900, but have a working Maemo rootfs

You have to flash Maemo 5 kernel back to the device in order to boot Maemo and recharge.

See the maemo.org wiki article on Flashing only the kernel from a FIASCO image.

• If flashing of Maemo kernel is successful
  1. Power down
  2. Remove MeeGo SD card
  3. Connect Nokia wall charger
  4. Wait for 30min to give device time to recharge
  5. The device will show amber status led until it boots to Maemo which will handle the rest of the charging.
• If flashing of Maemo kernel fails, or above doesn't help, keep reading.

In case you are unable to flash Maemo kernel or do not have a working Maemo rootfs to boot into

• You can always recharge the battery in another N900. Go to a phone store/friend/enemy near you and ask nicely if they can charge your battery for a while.
• Recharge the battery using a phone compatible with the battery (refer to instruction manual). As always - you are doing this on your own risk.
• Other creative ways to charge battery exists, ask help from MeeGo community.