Tech: N97 White Screen of Death

January 5, 2010 9:30 am Nicole my life

Gotten the Nokia N97 less than a month ago, during a lucky draw at the Nokia Christmas’09 Party, and its thanks to Nokia, Text100 for the lovely invite to the Pierside, One Fullerton.

The phone functioned very well, till 31st December 2009, Eve of the new year. It literally died on me, on my way to dinner. I was relying heavily on Google Maps to guide myself to Dempsey Road, when the phone froze and refused to start up after that. I’m pretty much horrified. Because I didn’t carry a spare phone with me, I have no way of contacting my friends.

Big thanks to Neo for lending me his spare phone to tie me through the ordeal (can’t think of a better word to describe this experience).

Decided to find a way to fix this White Screen of Death problem. To put it simply, White Screen of Death (WSOD) is basically having your Nokia phone having a white screen and nothing happens after that.

What I am going to share here, is a simple tip to recover your phone from WSOD. I tried it, and it worked, else I won’t be sharing it here with you :P Chanced upon the solution at Nokia’s Support Discussion Forum

So here are the steps to revive your bricked phone:

  • press and hold”from the full kaypad”: the backsapce key + space + caps lock
  • while holding these keys power on ur phone
  • keep holding until the time zone selection is appeared

It should work, and revive your WSOD-ed phone. :)

Oh yes, note that all your data and settings in the phone memory will be erased. But whatever’s saved in the Mass Memory or your external memory card, its safe. I checked it and all my photographs and downloaded apps are still safe.

Alrightey, may this tip come in handy if your Nokia Phone ever WSOD :P

Nicole
4 Responses

  1. Justin Ng :

    Date: January 5, 2010 @ 12:10 pm

    Didn’t you bring it down to Nokia care centre?

  2. Nicole :

    Date: January 5, 2010 @ 12:13 pm

    @Justin Ng: No I didn’t bring it down. Besides, I want to find a way to get my data back before sending it down :)

  3. Henrik :

    Date: January 26, 2010 @ 4:13 am

    Hi.

    I found a very effective hard-reset-free solution from another forum (ipmart). It seems to work every time in all WSOD cases – my phone is N97 firmware 20.0.019. It requires the charger, here goes:

    All you need is:

    N97
    Charger

    Follow these steps:

    - Turn off your phone.
    - Insert charger.
    - Remove charger right after screen lights up.
    - Wait a couple of seconds till screen turns off and just after that press power button.
    - After standart vibration wait approx. 60 secs.
    - VOILA! You can insert your PIN again and the phone boots normally!

    This works for me every single time the WSOD problem occurs :-)

    So NO MORE hard-resets! :-)

    Of course it is still really bad that Nokia doesn’t have an official fix for this yet, since every normal user would propably never try things like this (or want to carry his/her charger around for emergencies), and hence will be forced to deliver the device to a service shop with subsequent hard-reset as a result, which just plain sucks.

    Regards,

    /Henrik…

  4. Nicole :

    Date: January 26, 2010 @ 3:50 pm

    @Henrik: Hey, thanks for the suggestion. *If* the problem ever returns, I will try it and see if it works :)