Posts Tagged ‘flushing hanging nokia 9300i to default firmware’

How to reset to factory defaults (hard reset) hanged Nokia 9300i device / How to format your Nokia 9300i

Friday, May 28th, 2010

Today my Nokia 9300i device became completely useless, after a reboot. Yesterday I installed on my 9300i an application called AppMan which according to it’s description looked like a superb program.
After installing it few of my applications stopped working. I decided to leave it that way and continue playing with the phone on the morning so I went to bed.
This morning when I woke up I decided to install the Psiloc HotSpot Finder cause I needed a handy application to connect to the wireless networks.
After installing and trying to learn some of all the installed applications I received the re-occuring error:
system: unable to find the specified object.“.

I thought a restart would fix it so I restarted the phone by unplugging the phone battery without switching on the phone using the front swith on / off button.
Just a bit later I red online that in order to properly reboot the Nokia 9300i device it’s necessery to first: Switch off the front panel and then unplug the battery ..
I plugged in the battery again and switched the phone it booted okay and prompted me to enter the current date. I filled in the date and confirmed it.
A message reading:
system: unable to find the specified object. followed by a Continue button poped up right after the date dialog. I pressed it and another dialog poped up … just a few seconds later the screen started messing up and froze.
I waited for a couple of minutes and when I got really irritated I restarted it again, again unplugging the battery with the hope it was some temporary hang.
Well pitily I was wrong next time the phone switched on and when I entered current date in the date dialog it hanged once again… Well I thought okay let me try to restart once again, so I restarted.
This time even the set date dialog doesn’t appeared but the screen messed up after the phone showed up the Nokia logo and the boot progress bar, the progress bar was completed and the phone froze showing up part of the Nokia Logo and partly something from my Desk.
I restarted once again the phone and started experimenting if I can somehow recover the nokia to boot normally once again.
I red in the internet in a forum that there is a possiblity to fix an unbootable nokia 9300i, with restart unplugging the battery and keeping the Front located Switch on button on the phone.
Though this prooved untrue for me pressing the switch on button produced no results.
Seeing that this won’t make the 9300i phone boot I decided to try to remove the Mobile MMC card and try if it’s gonna boot without the card, however this didn’t worked.
Then I tried to remove both the sim card and the MMC Mobile card and try to boot the phone with only the battery but without the sim card but it seems without the sim card the phone doesn’t even start booting.

I red many forums online and tons of other tries among which I tried to cancel the application that was hanging on the phone with the key combination:

1. SHIFT + CTRL + K
2. SHIFT + CTRL + CHR key + K

The two upmentioned key combinations are embedded into the 9300i and 9500 application and would close the last active application on the symbian OS.
I tried both holding for a minute the shift + ctrl + k and shift + ctrl + chr + k and pressing them many times during the phone was booting.
One of the times I was able to kill all the applications except the one responsible for the telephone book, then I tried pressing the telephone Desk button hoping that this would make the Desktop application to launch, but again it didnd’t launched.
Having the phone book available I tried to switch on the front panel of the phone but the panel won’t switch on in that “emergency” mode.

The situation seemed desparate .. my phone was completely dead. Anyways I was lucky that I found in Google some guys who shared how they have achieved to reset the Nokia 9300i to factury settings using the embedded Nokia Format phone program.

To use the embedded format to reset the device to factory settings I had to keep pressed:

3. SHIFT+CTRL+F

for some time after plugging in the phone battery. It’s really imporant to keep the keys pressed before the Nokia Handshake logo appears.

Some people say it’s necessery to press and hold shit+ctrl+chr key + f before the Format dialog shows up, however I tried and this and this key combination wasn’t working.

After I succesfully invoked nokia’s built in format program a blue screen appeared with the options:

Format and Cancel

I proceeded and selected the Format and the device formatted, the format took only 20 or 30 seconds and therefore I suspect this format as nokia has called it is not a real format but it’s just some quick way to restore the original factory firmware to the mobile.

Currently after the succesful format the phone started booting in normally once again and my front panel of the phone is working once again.
Unfortunately some of the programs which were installed on the Phone’s C: drive are missing or not working, but I was lucky to install most of my applications on my 1GB MMC card
It’s probably worthy to note that during the phone format I formatted the phone without the external 1GB MMC card, because I have worries that the format could somehow erase data from the MMC card.
It’s really nice that after the factory firmware was reversed when I plugged my external MMC card with all my software installed on it works without any problems with the phone. Even the installed applications on the MMC works perfectly fine.
But wait even there is a positive thing from flushing the phone Nokia 9300i with back to it’s firmware! Now my mobile firmware Symbian OS works a way faster 🙂