Thread: New GPS - how to use old maps off of SD Card

Originally Posted by Butters

Guys, I respectfully disagree with that. Garmin will replace a bricked device under warranty immediately. They don't raise questions unless you are silly enough to say you've been mucking around with it's firmware which does of course void the warranty.

Well, I'm the first to say that I'm no "angel" but isn't that deceptive/immoral action? It's like buying an item, and you FUBAR it when Garmin warns you before hand not to do it and then sending it back to get it fixed for free (this of course if it's still under warranty) I can see it now, a bunch of new model of Garmin unit arrive in tech support/repair group. They investigate and found firmware was bogus. They started looking around in forum and found out why. Then of course the consequences follows.

Originally Posted by Butters

If you do 'patch' a map, i.e. unlock an img file, then having it on the device might in fact cause a problem should it get sent back to Garmin under warranty or not.

Interesting, I'm not surprise that Garmin might have a counter-cracked security check or something got corrupted and your unit FUBAR because of a bad .img
But never seen one posting of that problem.

Originally Posted by Butters

Do you mean Garmin MapUpdater? It's only been left available to service older LM devices that don't have a visible file system (the region-only types without MSM). It usually won't supply the most recent maps to modern LM device but GarminExpress will. Although GarminExpress started off as a flaky bit of , it's now been refined to the point where it's quite usable and reliable but initially I reckon they released it as a deep Alpha version, at the time I had less bugs around my back porch light. In proportion, it did brick far more devices early on than Big-Bang's firmware patcher or any other unofficial manipulation ever did, although to be fair many were 'bricked' because ppl got frustrated with GE and unsafely disconnected devices while they were being updated which resulted in corrupt files, i.e. very easy to 'de-brick'.

Whatever that was needed to do a map update for nuvi765 LM; I remembered going through a lot of pain trying to do it on WinXP and finally gave up.

Originally Posted by Butters

In short: Bricking by a corrupt file (usually .img or .gpi or .vpm) is super-easy to fix. Bricking by an incorrect or corrupt 'system software' flashed to rgn14 is very easy to fix usually. Bricking by a wrong boot.bin/Ldr.bin can be permanent and literally result in a 'brick' (but not always).

Excellent info/tips. Need to be in future FAQ.