Monday, March 02, 2009

Quick note for Nokia owners trying to upgrade the firmware under VMWare/Parallels

Avoid doing it under virtual machines. Nokia's firmware update system restarts the cell phone dozens of times as part of the upgrade process so the host and virtual machine will get all confused and as soon as the host machine refuses to "forward" a USB connection to the hosted OS, the upgrade process will stop due to a disconnection. This may cause severe damage to your cell phone (taking it back to a Nokia care center could be the only way out, so they can "re-flash" your phone ROM).

When trying to upgrade my E71 to the latest v200.21.118 firmware using Parallels under OSx I got one such aborted process, but luckily it worked flawlessly when trying again with a real Windows XP.

Other quick tips:

  • Backup all cellphone data and check if your backup works before the whole process. Using "Tools -> Memory -> Options -> Backup phone memory" from within the phone worked fine;
  • Remove the microSD card before the process, just to be sure;
  • Avoid doing it under Windows Vista, as some have reported similar problems.
Some references with more details:

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