As you all probably know that I am now working as a Product Manager for Windows Mobile and Asus P750 uses one of the Ericsson Platforms as a modem. I have been using P750 for quite some time now. Yesterday I was browing MSDN on the Pocket IE and after some time the UI didn’t respond. By the way, I was connecting using HSDPA. So when the UE didn’t respond, I tried to close down the window and stop the operations, I also turned on WiFi in the process and bingo the whole phone hanged

Anyways, I did a soft reset but this messed up my file system. I first thought that it might be because the modem was writing data to Windows Mobile FS but that was not the case as the modem uses its own flash for data purposes. So it ultimately happens that Windows Mobile was swapping processes to create more runtime space and that is when the reset happened which left the file system corrupt and the whole FS was not unmounted properly. WiFi module in this configuration is also connected to Windows Mobile hence we rightly arrive at the conclusion that Windows Mobile FS is problematic especially when swapping processes.

Anyways, the next thing is the phone didn’t boot up. I tried a lot of different things but was not able to do a hard reset of the device. Finally after searching a whole lot, I got the answer. To hard reset Asus P750 without using the "Default Settings" options in the Windows Mobile OS and when the phone has not booted, keep the joystick up pressed, simultaneously press 2 and the reset button. Then you will have a screen asking if you need to do a hard reset and press the Green key and you are done.

That was the way I was able to make it working again, ofcourse I lost the pictures, music, downloaded softwares, etc. but other data was safely synced with my PC. And I am glad that this was not an implementation where the modem uses the host OS FS to store data. I need to contact my engineering team to investigate on the stability scenarios cause in that case, even the modem caliberation data would be stored on host OS so if somehow someone is able to corrupt the host OS ROM, the whole unit might go for a toss.

Thats it for the time being. Adios…