740 live - upgrade causes flashing cross of death!

[ianfielden]

Hi guys,

Any help appreciated on this one...

I upgraded my Live membership after the initial 3 months expired at the weekend. TomTom Home decided that it would like to upgrade my firmware at the same time and after inputting the upgrade code for the £80 12 month subscription the unit went and died and the home screen now shows a pictire of a hard disk in the bottom left and a red and white flashing 'X' in a circle appears. As you can imagine the thing plays dead....

I have soft reset the unit and no change, I have used the "manage my TomTom" to remove one application but the main one, data.chk, can't be removed because it tells me it is corrupted. Can't even remove it with Windows Explorer. I've renamed it data.old to see if that helps but nothing is working.

TomTom's very unhelpful hours of working (9-6pm mon-fri) match my own and trying to talk to them is nigh on bloody impossible...

Any help appreciated..

Thanks in anticipation
Ian

[ianfielden]

Sorry guys,

Just to make things a little more interesting (and difficult) the TomTom upgrade option doesn't like working over my works network and so I'm in complete limbo until I get home!!!

Worst is this is my first TomTom after years of trouble free service from a very able, but now old, Garmin Nuvi....:-((

[Andy_P]

Just clarify one thing (which should be a relief to you) - I've seen a few mentions recently of the "flashing cross of death" o na TomTom.

This is a term wrongly borrowed from the X-Box where the "flashing ring of death" lights around the power switch indicates a HARDWARE fault.
But the flashing red cross on a TomTom screen only indicates a problem loading the program from the SD card or memory and as such can happen for all sorts of (often trivial) reasons.

So I hope the phrase dies out!

Now.. on to your situation...
Looks like some memory corruption. You mention applications and "data.chk" being "the main one" - it isn't, it's just a small part of it that provides the warning sound effects.
If Windows can't delete it, it may be indicative of a more extensive memory problem, but you've done the right thing in renaming it for now.

But the first thing we ALWAYS shout about, is have you done a full backup of the system to your PC yet (using Windows Explorer not Home)?

Do that now, copying whatever you are able to. If one file won't copy, work round it and copy everything else in smaller chunks.

The most important things to get copied are your named map folder and the Loquendo voices folder.

Once you are satisfied you've got everything backed up, you should delete every file that ISN'T in a folder. Do not delete any folders or any files within folders. If you still can't delete data.chk just leave it renamed "old".

Then run TT Home and select "update" and select only the application it offers.

That should do it (you may need to do a reset before it will boot up afterwards.

If there are still problems, the next two stages to try are:
1. reformatting the internal memory (only if you're sure you have good backups, or
2. installing the application to an SD card and running it from there - in case the internal memory has become hopelessly broken (which does happen - mine is just like that and I run off an SD card permanently now).

But try the first solution first and come back for further advise if it doesn't work.

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