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Joined: 04/03/2003 21:22:30 Posts: 191 Location: United Kingdom
Posted: Sun Sep 14, 2003 8:04 am Post subject: Hard reset procedure
We have an iPaq 3970 with a 256Mb SD card plus an expansion sleeve containing a CF socket and an extra battery. We have a 1Gb card in the CF socket.
In the last 24 hours we've experienced the following:
1. TTN2.22 lost all its settings. When we ran the programT yesterday the original startup screen appeared. Once past that, we found that all our Favourites and preferences had disappeared. (It may be relevant that this may have been the first time we had run TTN after our first ActiveSync since we upgraded to TTN2.22. I mention this because I think I've read that TomTom have changed the way the settings are stored so that they are now supposed to get backed up during an ActiveSync. Could this perhaps have resulted in the settings getting lost, or TTN losing track of their whereabouts?)
2. Both Pocket Word and Pocket Excel refuse to start when selected from the Start menu. The machine locks up with the hourglass showing and the only way out is to soft reset. Clicking on a doc file in File Explorer allows the file to be viewed, but any attempt to close Word again results in a lock up. (Before today we hadn't used either Word or Excel for several weeks, so the problem could have been lying dormant for some time.)
3. Whenever the iPaq is switched on away from mains power we get a message saying that the Extended Battery is critically low and that the expansion pack will be powered off. (The battery is only about 3 months old, so shouldn't be conking out just yet, surely? Also, surely the CF slot ought to be able to draw power from the main battery?)
4. (This may result from problem 3.) TTN has spontaneously switched to reading map data from the SD card rather than the second set of data that we installed several days ago on the CF card.
Since all these problems have arisen at the same time, I wonder whether we may have a problem that might be cured by a hard reset.
Can anyone think of anything else we should try?
Am I correct in thinking that to do a hard reset on a 3970 we should press the soft reset button while pressing both the "calendar" and the "iTask" buttons?
What happens after a hard reset? Is there a step-by-step procedure set out anywhere? Will we have to reinstall ActiveSync either on the iPaq or on our laptop? When we do a first ActiveSync, will the disappearance of the files from the iPaq cause ActiveSync to think they have been intentionally deleted and will they therefore be deleted from the laptop as well?
Posted: Sun Sep 14, 2003 8:04 am Post subject: Hard reset procedure
1. That's correct, TomTom are now storing these in your My Documents directory, so maybe ActiveSync has goofed. If you check in your My Documents both on your Pocket PC, and in the ActiveSync directory within My Documents on the PC, do they look identical ? The other thing is, do you sync files in ActiveSync ?
2. I've seen this before, eject your Compact Flash card, and then soft reset the iPAQ (leaving CF card out), then try to start Word or Excel. What they do is on opening they try to build a file list, if you've got some directories on your storage card with tons of files in, it may be trying to search and catalog these and hang. This is something I use to get with Mazingo with Word, Excel and MS Reader, where the Mazingo directory on my storage card would have loads of little 1k files, but there would be several thousand. This may not be the solution for you, but try it and see.
3. Okay, what usually happens and I find this with my PCMCIA sleeve is that when you charge your Pocket PC, what will happen is it will charge the main Pocket PC Battery first, then start to trickle charge the external battery in the sleeve. I only charge mine whilst driving which is 2 hours a day, and sometimes within a few weeks, the extended battery hasn't had enough time to do a full charge. If you've got a charge socket on the sleeve, plug a power cable into this for about 5 hours and it should charge it for you. Don't also charge the iPAQ through the iPAQ connector, otherwise this will blow it. In-fact what I tend to do is to just eject the sleeve in most cases and just charge the sleeve on it's own (because again it will try and charge the iPAQ first).
4. Oooh, I wouldn't have it installed to two locations. If you are getting an extended battery warning message, then it's probably cutting power to the sleeve, in which case you probably won't have your CF card. In-fact that maybe the cause of problem 2, because Word/Excel may know you have some files on the CF card, and it's trying to read them to put it into a file browser window.
I wouldn't do a hard reset unless absolutely necessary. Try the above first and see what happens. What I would strongly suggest Hugh, is that with the 3970 there's a program called Pocket Backup by Sprite Software. Upgrade this to the latest version on their website, and start using it. You can backup the whole of your Pocket PC OS and main memory and the backup will be around 30-50mb in size, and you have two options. It can either back it up as an executable, so that you could hard reset your iPAQ, and double tap the exe file on your CF card and it will then restore your iPAQ to the last known backup before the problem which is ideal, or if you have your iPAQ in the cradle a lot of the times, there's a PC agent which will allow you to backup directly to a directory on your PC. This is the backup util I use now, and is superb! Start using it, it's a life saver.
If you hard reset the iPAQ, you are back to square one, from when you took the Pocket PC out of the box. You would need to delete your partnership in ActiveSync, but before that, copy all the files in the Pocket PC My Documents directory to another directory somewhere on your PC so you have these files just in case.
Joined: 17/05/2003 02:26:21 Posts: 3747 Location: Bedfordshire, UK
Posted: Sun Sep 14, 2003 8:04 am Post subject: Hard reset procedure
I agree wholeheartedly with Dave's answers to 1 and 2.
Number 3 - things are different with the PC Card Expansion Pack Plus (which I have) and, I believe, the CF Card Expansion Pack Plus (the one you have on that 3970). There's no charging socket on the expansion pack, so the rules and cautions about the two charging sockets don't apply. On my setup, both the expansion and internal batteries seem to charge simultaneously. Each has their own flashing light anyway - flashing orange for charging, solid orange for fully charged.
I have seen spurious warnings on the expansion battery when it gets down to about 40% - the 'gas gauge' is not awfully linear. Suddenly the reported charge can drop to 20% and you can get the 'battery very low' warning.
Number 4 - This sounds like it could be to do with the loss of the configuration files (which I'd probably blame on ActiveSync myself if you're synchronising files).
Hard reset is the last resort as Dave says. In addition to the button sequence you already described, Hugh, you have to remove all external power to hard reset. That means that you have not only to remove any charging cable, but you also need to remove the expansion pack because of its external battery.
After a hard reset you need to wait a few seconds then either apply external power or soft reset again to wake up the iPAQ. It will then be as it was when you first bought it, save that the iPAQ File Store will be intact, also the Permanent PIM (if you still have the 2.00 ROM installed) will resynchronise anything configured in the Permanent PIM from the backup.
Pocket Backup is great - though I have had trouble with a self-executing backup not working after a hard reset, even with the latest 2.1.1 version. I didn't report that to Sprite as I failed to write down the error message (I was in utter panic; I thought I'd hosed my 3970 completely - though I'm embarrassed about my failure here, as I have found and reported several bugs in Pocket Backup 2 which Sprite have cheerily fixed).
Once I reinstalled Pocket Backup, I could then execute the self-extracting backup. To be sure of avoiding this problem if it ever happens to me again, I keep a copy of the CAB file for Pocket Backup on my storage card, with the read only flag set.
Joined: 04/03/2003 21:22:30 Posts: 191 Location: United Kingdom
Posted: Sun Sep 14, 2003 8:04 am Post subject: Hard reset procedure
Thanks to you both for your very detailed replies.
We do have lots of small files on the CF card. I seem to remember reading somewhere that there may be a way of telling Pocket PC not to look for "document" files on a storage card. It would be good to be able to use Word and/or Excel with the CF card attached. Does this ring any bells with you?
At the moment we've removed the extra battery and the CF card seems to work fine without it. When we have an opportunity to have the unit attached to a power source for an extended period we'll try reinserting the battery and see what happens. We'll watch the flashing lights carefully!
If we find that the battery has failed we'll have to see about replacing it. Searching the web, I can't find anywhere that sells spares. Do you know of anywhere?
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