How to flash your N950 with pre beta FW to the latest FW (tutorial)

I received a N950 dev kit last week and when I turned it on for the first time nothing happened. I decided to flash the device to the latest beta FW but wasn’t successful using either the Mac or Windows OneClickFlasher installer. The error message that appeared on the command prompt read ‘Failed to erase MMC using ‘secure’ method’. The device would also stay in a reboot loop while connected to a PC.

Amanda Lam pointed me to the Wiki on how to use winrar to extract the files in the exe and run the flasher manually. I was able to revive the phone but unable to upgrade the latest firmware. I thought I might need to install beta 1 prior to beta 2 to get the latest FW.

Below are the steps that I took to get beta 2 successfully installed on a N950 with 15-7/pre beta 1 software.

Download the Win_OCF_22-6_EMMC_RM680-OEM1-916.exe beta 1
Download the Win_OCF_34-2_EMMC_RM680-OEM1-916.exe beta 2
Run the process as described in the Wiki for each of the beta files.
After restarting the phone when finishing running the beta 2 flasher, you will notice a Facebook, Twitter app on the main screen. This is an indication that you have successfully upgraded to beta 2.

Ronan MacLaverty from Nokia has a solution where you can skip the beta 1 installation step and just install the beta 2 flasher by simply adding –c (cold flash) in the run command.

Download the Win_OCF_34-2_EMMC_RM680-OEM1-916.exe beta 2 or latest beta from OneClickFlasher page on developer.nokia.com.
Extract the exe file using WinRar, run the msi file and open the command prompt.
Type the following: …/Win_OCF_34-2_EMMC_RM680-OEM1-916>flasher.exe –c –F RX-71.bin –F emmc.bin –f.
Device will boot up into 34-2 (beta 2).

Let us know if you have any questions by contacting me on twitter or by leaving a comment.