REBOOT LOOP - Fixed!

[gponick]

So, first a little background story:

 

Saturday night I'm sitting at home in NYC, hanging out with some friends. I'm the DD, of course, despite being home, since I've got the SUV and the weather was crappy. Needless to say, someone got REALLY drunk. Not slurring your words drunk; Not violent drunk; Stone-cold passed-out a-bomb-won't-wake-me drunk. I knew where my buddy lived, mostly, but I had a few doubts - seeing as how he just moved. Oh well, I figured, I'd just use my AVIC to view the map of the area and figure it out. Fast forward 2 hours...

 

Now I'm driving around and I'm 4 blocks from my current location on my AVIC. I'm thinking to myself, WTF. My GPS was so far off that I was travelling north, and it had me going south and east(actually moving, not just facing). I thought that was pretty obnoxious, but figured what the hell, no big deal. I had green signal from my GPS though, so it was a little confused. REEEEEEEEWIND to 2 weeks prior when the thing booted up in another language entirely, and the illumicolor disabled. Weird. Oh well.

 

So, I hop in my car Sunday night and lo-and-behold, I've got the reboot loop! OH NO! I figure I'll just throw in my SD card with Test Mode (that I've used to upload my mod'd data.zip) and all will be well. Hrm. Failure. So I go home and give up. Monday comes and I know I can't drive to work with no radio, so I figure I'll try the 3.0 update that I had been putting off. I grab my package from Pioneer and head to my car. Pop in the first card and boot. Still reboot loop. I figure I'm gonna give up, but first I'll try the service menu to make sure I can at least get into something stored on "ROM". Hold eject+map+menu and push the reset button. Let go of reset and wait for the speaker pop, then let go off all the buttons. Holy crap, my radio boots! So, I can't get GPS, but everything else works. Only other odd part is that the illumicolor strobes on and off slowly. Weird.

 

So, I know what you're thinking. What's that mean to us, gponick? Well kiddo, it's simple: My unit was hosed. Something caused it to reboot once it started booting. However, once I held the keycombination of

1. Eject + Map + Menu + Reset
2. Let go of Reset
3. When you hear the speakers 'pop', let go of everything.

is apparently some sort of "safe mode". I didn't see anything about it posted here, either, but I admittedly may have missed it.

 

So, Tuesday comes and I go to do the Pio update again, this time, though, I'll start with a real service menu format. I pop in the card, and now I try the real service mode. But, wait, I effed that up again and did it my wrong way(see above). Holy crap, it boots to flash! I yank the flashcard, hoping I can reboot before it starts, but it starts erasing stuff off the internal storage of the AVIC. Bleh. So I pop in the update card and let it finish. It finishes fine, and reboots, but now it hangs on "System startup in progress. Please wait" for 3-4 minutes, then reboots. Popping in the 2nd update card from Pio doesn't help. BLAAAAAAAAARGH. So what do I do? I try my testmode card. Regular boot doesn't fire it, so I try my "safe mode". It boots into testmode. Sweet!

 

I then did the complete unofficial 3.0 update (including the full format) and my unit worked fine. No more reboot loop. It seems this is probably a fairly failsafe way to bring the unit back to life if it's dead.

 

tl;dr:

0. Have your Pioneer be in a bad state.

1. Use menu+map+eject+reset, let go of reset, hear pop, let go of all with your testmode card in

2. Do 3.0 unofficial update

3. ?

4. Profit!

[wedebrook]

To fix the rebooting issue, make a backup of your good, working flashdisk. Then, if it fails again, just use testmode to overwrite the corrupt files with your backup you made.