Is my SMT5600 dying?

[nirav28]

Not sure if anyone can help me here , but here goes.

My SMT5600/C500 from AT&T (Runs on tmobile now) went bad on me a few days ago. I turned it off for the night and when I woke up in the morning and turned it back on, it stayed on the Windows Mobile Bootscreen. I've tried to do a hard reset by holding down the 2 soft buttons and pushing power. I get the black menu asking me if I want to reset it to factory default. After I select 0 as an option, it seems to reboot and shows the audiovox startup screen and then finally stays stuck on the blue windows mobile screen. If I let it sit on the windows mobile screen, after a while I see the blue light flashing that indicates that bluetooth is on. So the phone is somehow stuck after some startup programs execute. I know timing is everything when using the above method to do a hard reset. I've done this at least a dozen times so far. But nothing has worked.

I even tried weird things such as bring up the RGB screen thats used for flashing the rom. Thinking that might somehow clear whatever corruption it might have. But nothing has worked so far. Is there anything else I should try before I write the phone off as Dead?

The last thing I remember doing the night I shut down the phone was install Mapopolis. But I rebooted the phone several times after that install to enable the serial port to work with my BT GPS receiver. It was working without any problems. Someone at work suggested that I should try to get a copy of someones ROM backup and reflash my phone. But not many people have the SMT5600/C500. At least none that I know.

Any suggestions?

[jfreiman]

Have you tried calling Audiovox and see if you can send your phone in for repair?

You could try flashing the ROM, but for me, it seems too cumbersome.

[Jerry Raia]

Have you tried taking the battery out for a while?

[Mike Temporale]

Have you tried taking the battery out for a while?

I would start here. Take it out and leave it out for an hour or so. Then re-insert it, plug in the phone and charge it - without powering it up. Let it charge for a good hour or so. Then try booting it - leave it plugged in. If it still hangs do the hard reset, and leave it plugged in the whole time. I know the hard reset process appears to hang at one point, but don't worry it just takes time. Leave it be and it will come around.

[nirav28]

Well I'm jumping up and down with joy now. My SMT5600 is working,.


Here's what I did. I came across a posting on modaco regarding flashing non-audiovox roms to the smt5600. (Orange update). So after reading that, it got me to wonder if that same procedure can be applied to reseting my phone back to the original ROM.

First , I brought up the RGB screen on the phone and plugged it in using the sync cable. Once I did that , I used Tera Term to issue a "r2sd all" command to initiate a rom backup onto the SD card. Once I had the rom image on the SD card, I restarted the phone and brought up the RGB screen and it asked if I wanted to flash my phone with the image on the SD card. I was able to dump the image back onto the phone. This is the orginal image that the phone was flashed with when I bought it from AT&T wireless.

It works . The downside to all of this is , that I lost all the custom modification I did. Such as removing the AWS branding for mMode and other useless stuff. Of course I lost all my contacts and SMS messages. But I have those in outlook, so I can sync them back.

thanks for those who posted and provided suggestions. Cheers!

[ctmagnus]

Interesting! Do you still have the link for the instructions on Modaco? You never know when you'll have to resort to something like this to resuscitate a device.

[mimitche]

Well I'm jumping up and down with joy now. My SMT5600 is working,.


Here's what I did. I came across a posting on modaco regarding flashing non-audiovox roms to the smt5600. (Orange update). So after reading that, it got me to wonder if that same procedure can be applied to reseting my phone back to the original ROM.

First , I brought up the RGB screen on the phone and plugged it in using the sync cable. Once I did that , I used Tera Term to issue a "r2sd all" command to initiate a rom backup onto the SD card. Once I had the rom image on the SD card, I restarted the phone and brought up the RGB screen and it asked if I wanted to flash my phone with the image on the SD card. I was able to dump the image back onto the phone. This is the orginal image that the phone was flashed with when I bought it from AT&T wireless.

It works . The downside to all of this is , that I lost all the custom modification I did. Such as removing the AWS branding for mMode and other useless stuff. Of course I lost all my contacts and SMS messages. But I have those in outlook, so I can sync them back.

thanks for those who posted and provided suggestions. Cheers!

Nirav28 you are a god! I had the exact same problem after my phone froze a couple of nights ago and I just got it working again following your steps.

Thanks!