Palm TX hotsync and reset nightmares

Posted on December 20, 2007 in Palm. - No comments

Over the last few days my Palm TX has become increasingly bothersome. I’ve not had the “continuous” soft-resets experienced by others – in fact, until recently it’s been remarkably stable with the only application really giving me problems being Blazer (and even that was more to do with my decision to revert to the previous version of Graffiti.

Now, I’m experiencing problems hot-syncing and even if I do manage to hot-sync successfully the TX does a reset when it gets to the “cleaning up stage”.

The first thing to try and fix was the problems hot-syncing, and to try and establish what it was that was causing the problem there. It seemed that the hot-sync process would get stuck when it came to “media”.

I could well believe this as I’d been playing around with movie files (I was planning on putting together an article about watching movies on the Palm TX, which I still may do soon.). I wasn’t sure what I’d done to cause the problem, but I thought a little bit of housekeeping wouldn’t go amiss.

Using the incredibly useful FileZ tool, I took a look at the DCIM folder on my memory card. There were a couple of movies and a bunch of database files such as card.db, CollectData.db and AllAlbum.db. Having confirmed that I had a copy of the movie files, I deleted everything in the DCIM folder.

Reset while “cleaning up”

This problem wasn’t so easy to solve. The was no information in the hot-sync log to indicate why this was happening. (“Hot-Sync Complete” doesn’t give you much to go on!)

So as usual it was the same old story of searching the net for a solution. There was lots of postings from people talking about their reset problems, but no real answers and nothing that seemed to indicate what was going on. There was nothing on the Palm support knowledge-base either.

During my travels however I found an article entitled My handheld soft resets or reboots whenever I open the Documents application, or a file within the application.
on the Dataviz website.

Following the guide I downloaded the Dataviz Tech Tool and installed it. This of course meant another reset during the hotsync to install it! Once the application was installed I did the following as instructed on the support page:

• After the sync, find the “DataVizTech” app on your handheld, and open it
• Tap the upper left hand corner of the screen to view the menu
• Select Advanced Options
• Tap the first button, “Delete Preferences” (tap Yes to confirm)
• Next, tap the third button,“Delete Temp Database” (tap Yes to confirm)
• Perform a soft reset by pressing the reset button inside the hole on the back of the handheld

Now with that done it was the moment of truth. I clicked on the hot-sync button and crossed my fingers! To my relief it worked! I really hadn’t fancied the idea of resetting my TX to factory default and reinstalling everything!

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