Hi there,
I had eMMC memory failure and was able to make it work with a 2GB micro sd card. My story was the following: after I've dropped the phone it started to reload after you switch it on..an infinite loop until you remove the battery. So I've taken the phone to Nokia service center and they promised to take a look, and gave an estimate of SGD80-150 to repair. After one week when I've called them they said that the problem is with motherboard and they cannot fix it, hence i took the phone back. However I've noticed that now the phone is loading, the only thing is that most of the applications fail to run due to "not enough memory" and also the eMMC 32Gb storage was not accessible. I believe nokia guys have tried to flash the latest version of firmware but failed to flash the eMMC image thus concluded that eMMC has failed and decided not to spend time anymore. However they've not provided any explanation and said that there's nothing that can be done, phone is simply unusable.
I've tried to flash the new firmware several times but the eMMC was failing all the time..just a side note here: on win xp it would not find the correct USB device, at least on my box. On windows7 it worked, and I've seen the real error message (don't remember the message text though). After googling the error message, I've realized the eMMC is physically broken and did not attempt to recover it anymore. My next steps were to move the swap files to a microSD card to overcome the "not enough" memory and make the phone usable..and here is how I did it:
I assume here that your system is running but you get the "not enough memory" error when running memory consuming applications, e.g. camera. I also assume that you have flashed the rootkit in r&d mode, so you have root access.
I've created two 1Gb partitions on my microsd card, one for the swap file and another one for phone storage:
put the micro sd card into the phone and execute the following as root:
sfdisk /dev/mmcblk1 << EOF
1,30000,c
30001,,82
EOF
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mmcblk1p1 bs=512 count=1
this will create a 1Gb fat partition and the rest will be ext2 swap, if your microsd card is bigger then 2G, adjust accordingly. Normally I think 1Gb swap file shall be more then enough (the original swap file was 768m if I'm not mistaken)
Plug in the usb cable, enter mass storage mode and format the new drive with fat32. Make sure it's not formatting the whole micro sd card, shall be only the first partition (check the volume size, shall be around 1Gb and not 2Gb)
then type the following as root
mke2fs /dev/mmcblk1p2
mkswap /dev/mmcblk1p2
swapon /dev/mmcblk1p2
this will create a filesystem, create a swap file on it and change the system settings to use the swap file on that drive. You can check the status of your memory (including swap file usage) by typing "free". The swap file size shall not be zero at this point.
Now check your camera application, shall be working now. However you'll need to run the "swapon" command every time you restart your phone. Also you may notice that the phone is very slow when loading applications. You can tune this by setting the "swappiness". The following steps will make the "swapon" and swapiness be executed automatically on every startup:
create a new file in /etc/event.d folder:
vi /etc/event.d/startup-script
and put the following
---file starts here---------------------
start on started hildon-desktop
stop on starting shutdown
console none
service
script
swapon /dev/mmcblk1p2
echo 30 >/proc/sys/vm/swappiness
end script
---file ends here---------------------
This script will be executed automatically on each startup. It simply calls the swapon command and sets the swapiness to "30" (which is 100 by default). Now the applications shall run fast,at least not slower then on your original phone setup. You'll also have 1Gb of storage for your files accessible via file manager.
Please note you'll need to play with camera settings to make it save images and videos to microsd card (and not eMMC which is not available anymore)
Hope this helps,
Artash
