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What drag it is getting older.
Last night, for no discernible reason, my beloved e800's flash ROM went TANGO UNIFORM.
No warning. No recent droppage. No intermittent prior access problems. I just clicked on the flash ROM disk folder to open a file and... nothing happened.
The lack of a "+" icon next to its name should have been a tip off.
I tried using Storage Tools on the file. They reported that the data were there but I could not do anything to the file. I tried scanning, repairing, defragging and, ultimately, formatting the disk. Except for formatting, all attempts were immediately met with a warning that the disk contained errors and that I should try repairing it again (even when I was hitting "repair" ... duh).
Formatting was a little different. Formatting erased about 95% of the contents but then a warning dialog would pop up saying that access to the disk was denied.
I tried copying some files to the ROM but I got an "Error 30: The system cannot read from the specified device."
I realize my computer is middle-aged (about 1 year and 4 months) and that this may be a non-recoverable situation. According to a status program, there's about 2 meg of *something* left in the ROM after trying to format it.
I've tried a hard reset and, even in factory state, it won't allow me to copy to the ROM. It's not a software problem. Is there anyway to try to format or repair the disk from the host computer using ActiveSync? I was hoping a "stronger" defrag or formatting program might be able to break through whatever is locking me out of the ROM.
Seriously would appreciate any ideas.
Well, that was weird.
After several soft resets and one hard reset and restore in the middle of that, the flash ROM has come back to life.
If'n you're interested, here's what I did (but I have no idea if this really had anything to do with getting it to work again).
There were data in the ROM but the computer couldn't read or write to the flash.
1. Tried to format the disk with Storage Tools. This erased all but about 600K or so.
2. Tried to format the disk with SKTools. This completely erased the disk but the machine still couldn't read or write to the ROM.
3. Used MemMaid's Quick Clean utility (the cache is on the ROM - which may have caused the problem in the first place).
4. Opened a browser window with an active internet connection.
5. Closed the browser. Ran MemMaid again. Flash ROM showed up as a usable directory.
Hope this helps anyone else that might run into this problem.
Moral of the story: you can never register too many system utilities. I almost feel I shortchanged ctitanic because I didn't find a way to work Tweaks2K2 into all this.
Eh, spoke too soon. Looks like the flash is still buggered.
The folders reappeared but I still don't have access to the file. And the machine can't read from it or write to it still.
Time to get a bigger CF card. Here's why multiple media are important... redundancy.
Sorry I missed your post earlier. Here's what you do to solve it on an Axim. You go through the motions of a hard reset of the device, but right before it hard resets you cancel out.
That "reconnects" the extra storage for the Axims. Do you know of any way to perform this on the e800?
Brad-
OK, you got me interested. How do you "opt out" of a hard reset after you hit the buttons?
On the e800, to hard reset you push in the reset button and the power button at the same time. The hard reset is immediate.
Do you mean that I should again push in the reset button and hope that it cancels the call for a hard reset? Please tell me how you do this on an Axim.
I posted over at Brighthand about this problem and while not getting a lot of solutions, I did get a lot of "me too" responses. This problem seems to be pretty widespread but most people have just decided to ignore it. When the e800 came out, the standard SD card was about 256Meg. Now 1 gig is pretty much the norm. 32Meg of flash memory meant something back in the day... now not so much.
Linear Mode
