Suggestion to try recharging battery before resorting to hard reset (my data loss)!

digital_nomad · 04-06-06, 08:40 PM

So I'm sitting at the airport just beginning a business trip that's going
to keep me away for weeks, and I'm depending on my X50V for navigation,
addresses, contacts, notes, etc. etc.

I've loaded some MP3s, PDFs, etc. on my storage cards for education &
entertainment during the trip.

I've *never* in several months of ownership had to hard-reset the X50V, though
had soft-reset a few times a week due to things like program crashes,
memory full errors, etc.

Everything I had an easy choice to store to the SD / CF memory cards
(application installs and personal files) was on the SD / CF cards, though many
applications and all the "built in" programs' files from NOTES, CONTACTS,
CALENDAR, etc. was in RAM and there just was NO CHOICE to set a preference
that they be kept, as a matter of course, on the storage cards.
I can't @(&*$^&@ believe the idiots who wrote these applications that DON'T
either BY DEFAULT or BY OPTION PREFERENCE permit you to INSTALL and SAVE
ALL DATA / PROGRAMS to the FLASH CARDS and NOT EVER to RAM!

Having GIGABYTES of flash memory cards with me, why would I want ANYTHING
in RAM?!

So with basically nothing else running on the X50V / WM2003 at the time,
I open up a simple PDF chapter of an E-book that's only about 3 Megabytes
in size and is hardly a very fancy PDF file at all.

Adode's Pocket Reader 2.x (I believe the latest version available) took forever
to load / render / process the thing, and of course made a total garbled mess
of displaying the document's font's making about every other character on the
screen a gibberish "error indicator" for unknown formatting / font data,
though every desktop PDF reader program, even very old versions of them,
all work just great at reading the file....

So of course after a few scrolls around the page, I give up on trying to read the
mess the Pocket Acrobat Reader makes of the file and try to close the program...
It just locks up becoming totally unresponsive to anything I can do with any
of the AXIM's buttons, and eventually I end up with a totally black screen
and an X50V that won't turn on, is apparently OFF (no lights / screen / functions
at all).... And it won't do anything when I soft reset it either...

So, having hours of flights / driving ahead, and nothing else I can do, I put
the apparently OFF X50V in my pocket and contine the trip.

When I get to the hotel hours later I still can't soft reset, turn it on, or get
any sign of life from the X50V (only a few months old, and which was FRESHLY
charged only several hours before, so I had better than 70% remaining battery
when I was using it at the airport just a few hours before).

I try plugging it into the USB data and charger cable to my laptop to see if
the laptop would "see" the X50V, or if that charging and data tethering
link would help "wake up" the X50V so I could turn it on / sync / reset it.
Nothing much happens.

Forlornly, eventually, thinking my fairly new X50V is a "dead brick", never
expecting it to work again, after a few hours I do my last resort, a "hard reset",
knowing that even AT BEST I'll lose most all my data, many of my programs,
and probably not have a very usable X50V for navigation and addresses even
if I get it back to life.

I had it cabled to the charger, and HARD RESET the unit.
Amazingly, that caused it to turn on for a moment, and I see that
it had 0% main battery charge, but it was "alive" (*whew* and *very pi$$ed off*)!

So my only conclusion was that maybe the software crash left it "totally dark"
(LCD / LED etc) but yet had somehow (!?!?!) extraordinarily quickly drained the
main battery from around 80% to 0% and maybe it was power loss that eventually
caused it to be non-responsive to even many SOFT-RESET attempts.

Even when it was on the data / charge cable, which should have given it enough
power to run the unit, it still had been usefully unresponsive to SOFT-RESETS
and any other action I tried short of the HARD-RESET.

Though since it had no battery left when I did hard reset it, I wonder if it
was unnecessary to hard reset it, but could have saved the data if I had
charged it overnight in the AC wall charger instead of just trying the USB
charge / power / data cable confident that the battery had been almost fully
charged last time I used it a few hours ago, and that it would have power
to run off the USB data / charge cable as it always seemed to whenever I've
used it for extended periods in that state previously.

I guess the morals of the story are:

a) if you have a bad crash that soft-reset can't recover, before a few minutes
go by, try pulling out the main battery for 30 seconds to ensure it has ceased
running (though I think I did that, I can't recall for sure).

b) Back up your data from RAM to memory card often, and try to find better
software that will let you install to memory card and save all data to memory card
as opposed to the junky built in programs which are, as far as I can tell, all
useless mis-designed crud!

c) Put the AXIM on an AC wall charger and charge it for hours even if it had
been fully charged if you get into a crash you can't immediately recover from
with a "soft reset"

d) If you still can't soft-reset, then only after a full recharge, and battery
reinsertion try to do a hard reset.

e) Avoid the horrendously trashy Pocket Acrobat Reader from Adobe at all costs,
and shun PDF files in general since they're nothing but non-portable
headaches that force you to use broken software and aren't nearly as
convenient to use as almost anything else would be (HTML WWW pages,
plain text, PostScript, etc.)

I still can't explain fully what happened, but it seems very much as if I must
have somehow through the software crash lost 80% of my battery charge
in a time of less than a few minutes (maybe even seconds)
and the AXIM became a "dead brick" -- though I didn't notice it getting hot,
so I don't know what to think, but it was fine before, is fine now, and
I did *everything* to get it to come back from being a "dead brick" before
the hard reset. I suppose the only hope would've been to take out the battery
before it had lost all the charge in just a few seconds / minutes?!

**Frenchy** · 04-06-06, 08:46 PM

Have you try to hard reset without clearing the Data? Is the lock button properly in the On position?

digital_nomad · 04-07-06, 03:21 AM

Originally Posted by Frenchy

Have you try to hard reset without clearing the Data? Is the lock button properly in the On position?

You can hard reset and not cause that to clear RAM? How? I'd have
loved to know that was possible. I thought that was what soft reset did.

I did take out, reinsert, and re-lock the battery compartment a few times before
I finally did the hard reset, though I think maybe it was too late for the battery's
charge by the time (minutes later) I resorted to that.

**Frenchy** · 04-07-06, 09:02 AM

When you hard reset it ask you to press a button to clear the RAM and another button not to clear the RAM. Press the appropriate button and that's it

04-07-06, 09:17 AM

I think that not hitting the proper button just negates the hard reset. Its like the "Are you sure?" dialog with anything else. IMHO.

Also, you have to watch the data/charger cables that go into USB ports. Yes they do provide some minimal charging capabilites but you should really plug it in (cradle or directly) if you really want to get charge to it. I've revived my seeminlgy dead x50v that way a couple times.