Did you turn on your Pioneer DVD AVH-XXXX unit only to be greeted by a "Enter Password" page, along with a "Password Hint" page? That's exactly what happened to us after installing a unit that my best friend inherited from a deceased friend. Unfortunately, she's passed and the hint that she gave wasn't good enough for my friend to guess. Now what, I said!!! Some hits seemed to suggest that one needs to bring the unit to Pioneer Service. Even the manual suggests doing so. First, I tried hitting the "reset button" located along the front face plate, towards the bottom right. This didn't work. This would have been too easy, and even the manual states that it doesn't clear everything. Then I stumbled upon the concept of putting the unit into Factory Service Mode. One can actually retrieve the password, by first putting the unit into factory service mode and then by reading an actual ASCII text password file. After not being able to navigate to the specific directory that contains the password file, as I couldn't find a "usr" folder, I noticed and tried successfully by performing a factory reset instead.
First, go here and build a set of boot files required to put your unit into factory service mode:
Keep everything defaulted except for the following two settings:
- launchMode=TestMode
- testSubMode=Serv Mode.
Your corresponding readme.txt file should look like the following:
Your SDCard Password is LKPFeD4BcVzESR2Y
The password was set to LKPFeD4BcVzESR2Y
set Boot Mode ullaunchmode to 0 (Default:Normal) at 4
set Launch Mode ullaunchmode to 1 (TestMode.apk) at 8
set Test SubMode to 1 (Serv Mode) at 12
set Boot Image Side Flag ulbootimageflag to 0 (Default:Side A) at 16
set Recovery Image Flag ulrecoveryimageflag to 0 (Default:Side A) at 20
set Debug Switch uldebugswitch to 0 (Default:Disabled) at 24
set USB OTG Switch ulusbotgswitch to 0 (Default:Host Mode) at 28
set Mem Check Flag ulmemchkflag to 0 (Default:no) at 32
set Sub Boot Mode sbspinfo.ulupdatesubflag to 0 (Default:Side A) at 36
set WARP!! sbspinfo.ulupdatesubflag to 2 (Default:Enable Warp) at 40
set Update Flag sbspinfo.ulupdateflag to 0 (Default:Recovery-Update) at 44
set Update Sub Flag to 0 (Default:SD Card) at 48
set UI Update Flag to 0 (Default:non-updating) at 68
CRC32 applied to warp Disabled image.
CRC32 applied to warp Enabled image.
CRC32 applied.
Plug a thumb drive into your computer. I removed all of the files that were already on it, but I'm not sure if this was completely necessary or not. Save all of the files that you just generated onto the thumb drive, by hitting on each file, one at a time. The files that do not open with a "save' dialog window, do not need to be saved, ex. readme.txt, SD*.txt.
If you can't find the page above, or don't want to build your own set of files, here's a rar compressed set that I had generated and used successfully for my password inhibited unit. I would imagine that these should work for most Pioneer AVH DVD units. Please feel free to grab them from the following dropbox rar file, also attached to this forum.
if you do grab my rar compressed file, please make sure that you extract the individual files before copying them over to your thumb drive.
The port that you need to plug the thumb drive into is "port 1". On my unit, AVH-4000NEX, port 1 is the top rear port.
Power up the unit. You should first see the password page, then after a little more time, the Factory Service Menu. Scroll down, select and execute "factory reset".
Voila, "Factory Fresh Unit"!!!
No more password, but actually, we ended up setting a new password along with a new password hint as well. But keep in mind, this is a total factory reset, like the type that first prompts you for your language, etc.
I hope that this help you save the time and effort that I went through and/or throwing out $$$ to pay some greedy person on Ebay, most likely for exactly the same procedure that I've described in this post.
If this works for you, please respond to this topic, as I would love to know that I've helped others out with the same issue and have saved you both time and money.
-Mark
