Thread: IMPORTANT! If you want HELP in case of a bricked Garmin device, please follow this

A blank screen is not a sure indication of the device being fully off, because for a healthy device it can also mean it's in standby. A bricked device may or may not be capable of standby but to be sure press the power button as you would to start it normally and when the 'snowy TV' screen shows leave it for about a minute then hold down the power button steadily for a while (might take up to 30 seconds) and when the screen goes black release the power button immediately. That way you can be sure it's completely off. Opening it to disconnect the battery is certain to turn it off of course and you may have to do that if the device just turns itself back on after releasing the button.

Garmin devices can be fussy reading some cards directly, even if the card's seen by computer when inserted in the device although it does rarely happen that way. Try another card to be sure, preferably one which was known to perform normally in the device before it was bricked.

If it won't read a card that only leaves flashing with Updater.exe which, as you know, means using preboot mode. So are you absolutely certain that it can't attain preboot? Because if it definitely doesn't recognize a media card and nor can it attain preboot it's simply not recoverable. Modern auto devices like Drive series are all notoriously hard to put into preboot and a bricked and boot-looping device adds even greater difficulty attaining and maintaining preboot. I think for Drive devices you must hold the screen in the middle, around on or over where the G or the G A in "GARMIN" would appear on the logo screen (by my uncertain recollection). If you or any reader knows for sure please post to comment as i don't have any Drive series device to hand. If it's around there and not in the top LH corner like most others it becomes a wild guessing game when you don't know for sure where those letters would be and the device is boot-looping too. In such a situation it might take dozens or even hundreds of tries to fluke it and then you only have mere seconds to react to start the flash anyway.

If you want to experiment getting it into preboot without actually initiating a flash with Updater.exe, keep Device Manager open when trying to connect to PC in preboot. If it does connect, a new entry named "GARMIN Devices" will suddenly show in the alphabetical list. If may only be there for a very short time if the device is boot-looping. It won't of course show in Windows File Explorer or Disk Management like it does in MSM. Temporarily mark the spot on the screen with a dab of Tippex or similar then do the actual flash of the original fw as an RGN with Updater.

EDIT: I forgot to mention about the GarminDevice.xml. It's written to by the device at the very end of a successful boot-cycle. Usually a device that can attain MTP/MSM would also be able to FULLY boot and therefore write to or re-write the XML and certainly that's so with any healthy devices, but when dealing with bricked/bootlooping devices it's impossible to know how far for sure they are actually getting into the boot-cycle before they restart. It may be simply that your Drive is booting far enough to show in MTP but not far enough for it to write anything to the XML. It may even be attempting to write to it that causes the bootloop.