Thread: GARMIN drivesmart61 flash APAC version firmware problem

Many thanks for the advice on making the hybrid firmware, the download link of gfw.exe and the heads-up about the tinny glitch of RGN tools which misidentifies the data of region 9E as that of region 7F when manually loading the resources_9E05.bin.

After fiddling with the firmware for a few days, I reckon that the ramloader of 2588 is quiet interesting. When opening the original firmware of 2588 with RGN Tools, the HWID field is blank/empty for both of boot.bin and fw_all.bin. With Hex editor, both of the HWID are shown as 00 00 (hex). If the original firmware is solely manipulated by writing the HWID as 2588, the error message "System Software Missing" will appear. The same error message will also appear for the hybrid firmware with the embedded HWID. If the hybrid firmware with null HWID (00 00 in hex) is used, the device will boot up but get stuck on setting the locale because of the unresponsive touchscreen. However, the device is still responsive to the forced power-off by long pressing the power button, and can be brought back to life by flashing the untouched firmware of 2588.

Since the conversion of DriveSmart 61 US/EU version to its APAC version has not been reported in this forum, I got sidetracked into converting the DriveSmart 61 to the known success case (Camper 770; HWID 2684) to see whether my procedure of making the hybrid .rgn file with kunix's makergn.exe is correct or the DriveSmart 61 can only be converted by a full firmware flashing. After flashing the DriveSmart-Camper hybrid firmware, the device can boot up, but the background of the welcome screen (The User Agreement, I guess) is filled with tons of tinny images with red font on white background. Being lucky again, not only the power button but also the touchscreen are functional.

Before venturing further, I reckon that I am better of making a backup of device-specific data/info since I do enjoy the entitlement to lifetime map update for North America region. I just wonder if it is sufficient to just back up the Region 154 in case I screw thing up. Many thanks!


Regards,

CL