Thread: How to make a service (cure) firmware for your Garmin unit

Originally Posted by aekhong

If you can see Ph JCV so it means nothing wrong.
Satellite lock may take a lot time for first fixation but you can set location at the position you are standing and Nuvi will take a little time to fix..

Oh.. I see. Good to hear nothings wrong with my unit. Thanks for the reply

Hi,

I have a nuvi 1250 and 1350 which is unable to enter into usb mode. When i plug in the usb connection the progress bar show about 1cm then it continues to load to the normal gps mode.
So far the only way i am enter the usb mode is to touch on the left top corner of the screen and connect the usb cable until it enters the usb mode. Anyone have ideas?

Howdy All,

Formatted my nuvi 1250 with NTFS, Hardware ID: 971, Unit ID: 3636440540 (from G7toWin). I've tried creating a few cure files and uploading them using updater with no success, updater tells me the update is successful however the device just reboots and then sits at the first garmin screen.

If anyone could point me in the right direction, that would be awesome. (hopefully not garmin tech support) :P, I think i'm just following the steps wrong.

Cheers,

@ crazybobzy

[Only registered and activated users can see links. ]

Thank you so much :D my 2460 is working like new now!!!

This is great, but... Mine will not go into Pre-boot mode.. It goes through the "Rights" splash and then hangs in the "Loading Maps." splash. I have tried the procedures above in many variations and holding different corners. It seems like it is not getting to the logic that allows you to get into pre-boot. Hmmm.. Any thoughts? Thanks for everything.

Here are things I learned after quite a bit of trial and error, that may help someone else (apologies if some of these are obvious to you; they weren't to me initially):

- This can all be done on a Mac (I used a 27-inch iMac with Intel i7, using VMWare Fusion (or Parallels) to run Windows (I used Windows 7 64bit)

- The instructions at the top of this post mention "your downloaded GUPDATE.GCD" file; the file will not be necessarily called GUPDATE.GCD. This becomes evident as you dig deeper in the linked posts, but it confused me a bit because I thought I was supposed to be downloading a file with that exact filename. For example, for my nuvi 2460, the filename is "nuvi24xx_GCDFile__250.gcd"

- The Updater.exe file is readily available directly from Garmin's website in several different places. The one linked at the top of this post is in some foreign language which confused me a bit. For example, this link to a file on Garmin's own website contains the Updater.exe program: htt p://w ww8.garmin.com/software/GPS18xPC_LVC_370.exe
or here is another link also on Garmin's website: h ttp://w ww8.garmin.com/software/GPS15H_L_440.exe
(Mac users - you can decompress the .exe archive using Stuffit Expander to get at the Updater.exe program)

- Very small point but still helpful to know: the instructions tell you to name the rgn files (both the original conversion from the GCD format and the modified "cure" file) using a very specific filename. It turns out (for the nuvi 2460 anyway) that this doesn't matter. I named the files "original.rgn" and "cure.rgn" and it worked just fine.

- In the instructions for using the hex editor XVI32 to modify the .rgn file, you can safely use Find/Replace instead of Find from the Search menu, to more quickly update all occurrences of the extensions such as .img, .vpm, etc. Just remember to check *both* checkboxes in the Find/Replace dialog box that say "as Unicode"

- You might need to install the USB drivers for the Garmin first. Windows 7 found the driver on its own via the Internet, but when I tried on Windows XP, I had to download the drivers and install them first before using Updater.exe. The USB drivers can be downloaded from Garmin's website here: ht tp://w ww8.garmin.com/support/download_details.jsp?id=591
at Garmin: USB Drivers Updates & Downloads

- THIS ONE DROVE ME CRAZY: The instructions for booting in preboot mode isn't quite right for the nuvi 2460. Instead, do this (works reliably):
1) power OFF your nuvi 2460;
2) press and keep holding the most left upper corner of the LCD screen;
3) now plug in the USB cable, but KEEP holding that left upper corner of the LCD screen
4) the computer will now recognize the nuvi

- Also, the sequence shown in the post for using Updater.exe isn't quite optimized. Here's a sequence that is easier to do:
a) drag and drop the cure.rgn file onto the Updater.exe icon - the program will launch
b) click the USB radio button (don't worry that you don't see the nuvi listed because it's not even connected yet)
c) have your mouse pointer over the OK button and just be ready to click it
d) now do the pre-boot as defined above in 1) through 4)
e) you'll see the nuvi's name appear to the right of the USB radio button momentarily - click the OK button right then
f) as soon as you see "Loader" on the nuvi 2460 screen, you can let go of the corner of the screen

- THIS ONE DROVE ME THE CRAZIEST: Somehow, in all my manipulations, I ended up with rgn files (both the original and the cured file) that were corrupted, but I didn't know they were corrupted. Oddly enough, the Updater.exe program didn't complain about the bad/malformed rgn flies when I drag-and-dropped the rgn file onto Updater.exe -- rather the program launched, and I clicked the USB radio button, pre-booted the nuvi, clicked OK in the Updater.exe window and instantly received an error message: XFERTHREAD.CPP-1101-2.8. I kept thinking there was some problem with my USB connection or the driver or Windows. In fact, it turned out to be a bad rgn file. How did I find this out? I dragged the modified rgn file back onto the Turboccc RGN_Tool and it said that the rgn file was not valid! Wow. So I converted the original GCD file to RGN a second time, and immediately dragged that RGN file onto RGN_Tool and it recognized it this time! So then I again went through the modification of the rgn file to become a cure file and then dragged the cure rgn file onto RGN_Tool to make sure it recognized it as valid. And this time, it did! So the missing step from the instructions at the top of this post are: verify that the cure rgn file you created/modified is valid by dragging and dropping onto the RGN_Tool again. Boy I wasted a lot of time on that one, because I never actually suspected that my cure rgn file was bad.

Thanks to all of the information available on this site - it was a long night, but in the end I succeeded in unbricking my nuvi 2460.

If you're curious how I bricked it in the first place -- I was modifying the voice files to increase the volume and lazily didn't use a hex editor (I used a text editor -- doh!) so this hosed the nuvi and it wouldn't boot. I did end up correctly modifying the voice files (I had backups) by using Hex Edit instead of BBEdit (remember, I'm on a Mac so both of those are Mac programs) and now I'm enjoying much louder voices!

Henry