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