Sudden T3 Failure

S

Spottie D.

New member
I have a Tungsten T3 which has worked flawlessly for almost 9 months. Yesterday, when turned on, it appeared totally unprogrammed as if it had just came out of the box. The battery was fully charged, but the unit had nothing on it. After several hot syncs and a few hours work reconstructing a few lost programs, it is now working properly again. Two questions for the experts: Any idea of what might of caused this? Also, if I am away from my desktop and if this happens again, what is the most reliable backup that I can get on a card that will allow me to reliably make a full restoration without having to reconstruct all programs including those which do not inherently come loaded on the Palm?
Any help will be appreciated. Hopefully, none of you will face a similar panic.
 
I got the same problem back in March, about a week after buying the T3. Did hotsync, everything was working fine. As soon as I took T3 out of the cradle, it turned on as hard resetted, i.e. as new. Why, still a mistery. I guess that, maybe, it was badly located in the cradle, and some sort of static current did that. Since then, it worked fine, with no problems.
As for backup, I use Card Backup of JKware http://www.jkware.com/CardBackup.php which works great, and is about 15 dollars.

Luigi
 
Thank you, Liugi. Several other questions please: If I get CardBackup and if the problem reoccurs, will I be able to bring up the program on a "blank" PDA? Also, I assume a 64meg card will backup the entire T3, correct? Any particular kind/brand card I should purchase? Is the Palm branded backup card better than the expansion/Cardbackup combination? Thanks again.
 
Luigi is probably right that an errant static electricity charge was the cause of the data loss. There's also a chance of a slightly loose battery cable that lost contact with the battery just long enough to produce a hard reset. If it happens again, I'd open up the case and check to make sure the battery leads are firmly seated.

I'm a Clie user, which has a backup and restore program in ROM so you can always restore from a hard reset. Your question about how Card Backup or any Palm backup program is a good one that I don't have an answer for but I'm sure that someone else here does. It seems like the program would have to install itself in flash memory to survive a hard reset. Having a card backup with no way to restore after a hard reset would do you no good so there must be a clever way these programs are able to preserve the restore function after a hard reset.
 
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