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Garmin Oregon 700 shuts down after 30 seconds


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My Oregon 700 has suddenly decided to spontaneously shut itself down after about 30 seconds from starting up. I have tried going into Settings to check if anything is amiss but am timed out before I can do this. I have tried changing batteries but this doesn't fix it.

Has anyone had experience of this and can suggest a solution?

Many thanks,

Alex

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Certain "bad" html in the GPX files causes all Garmin handhelds to crash.  This has been an an ongoing problem for a good decade.....  One century, the Garmin programmer might attempt to fix the issue....

 

For the most point GSAK strips out the problematic items, so using it as an intermediary usually prevent this from happening.

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2 hours ago, Mineral2 said:

It's likely a corrupted file somewhere. Start by connecting it to your computer and removing all GPX files from the GPX folder. If that doesn't work, you can delete the database files in the SQL folder. You can also attempt a master reset.

 

For the record, I've never had a master reset help anything other than wiping out all my custom settings.  But deleting a corrupted GPX file nearly always seems to fix any hiccups when geocaching.  That's why I always delete the caches.gpx file, then restart the GPSr, and then load a new GPX file in - it forces the GPSr to refresh its internal database.

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There have been various forms of corruption of popularity at different times. GPSBabel used to fix some. GSAK used to fix some. Groundspeak slowly added fixes on their side to make flagrantly broken GPX more rare. The one thing that's seemingly remained constant since the Garmin Colorado 400 about 10 years ago is that Garmins simply crash on some geocache files instead of displaying a parse error, reporting it upstream to the user, or whatever. Maybe there are some statistics that they crash less, but I still see posts like this often enough to be pretty sure this is not a solved problem for Garmin. They just reset and it's positively maddening. The onset of GGZ theoretically makes it more rare to happen as the device doesn't have to even parse the full GPX of a geocache until that geocache is selected from the menu, but even then, they still crash more than a device should in modern times.

Red90, if you want to play historical trivial pursuit with common forms of GPX/PQ breakage, some that come to mind include:

  • Garmin's own software used to write GPX with encoding of ISO 8859-1. GPX requires it be UTF-8. Oregon 400 or 450 or so used to crash on Garmin's own files.
  • Various software (including my own) do weird things when mixing GPX 1.0 and GPX 1.1 and that can cause some software to not read them. 
  • A software upgrade at Groundspeak caused all PQs to start with a Byte Order Mark, which was prohibited by GPX. Starting 2012-02-14 and for a couple of weeks/months, any software reader that strictly followed the spec requirement of UTF-8 or looked at the first few bytes and flipped out when they saw a BOM were doomed. Many programs responsive to the geocaching community quickly developed workarounds. See 
  • or so.
  • Back in 2003, there was a bug that lived for several years that allowed hex encodings of ASCII control characters that were forbidden in GPX. Encoding a backspace as 	 didn't make it less illegal. That used to crash some programs, but I think it was before GPSes read GPX. GPSBabel had code specifically to deal with it and I was so annoyed by it that I included code to get people to letterbomb Groundspeak to fix it. :-)  See https://github.com/gpsbabel/gpsbabel/blob/e7adcb0f395a0aae6ea288feaf2c721ff8266173/gpsbabel/gpx.c#L787 and the line at 833. That code's been gone for a long time and nobody's complained. This was one of many "fixes" where using GPSBabel to convert GPX to GPX resulted in better GPX.  (Yes, this "fix" inside GPSBabel is horrifying in itself and we don't have code nearly that fragile now.)
  • Early Garmins used to crash on embedded Javascript in the HTML instead of ignoring it. 
  • Through time various forms of 'bad' HTML markup have crashed the units. Over time, Groundspeak has cranked down the amount of "creative" CSS/HTML allowed (I'm guessing via something like htmltidy...) that's resulted in less weird stuff making it to the receivers. For a long time, older caches that were last created or last edited before the tighter restrictions were in place and would more likely crash the devices. Now the cache editors tend to "undamage" a lot of things like bad quoting or made-up HTML by Front Page or whatever. We just don't see things like
 foo='bar" 
(note the mismatched quote characters) making it into PQs much these days. It's also frustrating because different models of Garmins have overlapping bugs: we'll identify a specific cache that crashes the Oregon 450. The next month, they'll ship the 600s that still have the crash. It'll get fixed in the 450, but has to be independently identified and fixed in the 600. It really seems that not only are they not sharing code, the responsible teams aren't even talking to each other.
 

Because the Garmins parse the GPX from PQs on boot and they have poor handling of poor input (crashing instead of ignoring or error messaging or saving crash reports to be delivered back to the mother ship) that results in them booting, they often enter "boot loops" where a bad entry in a PQ will crash the device while booting, which makes it reboot and then crash when it tries to boot the next time and ...  I think later Garmins have gotten somewhat better at this, but this is the root of the wisdom of putting new pocket queries on your SD card so you can remove it and at least use the GPS to get you back out of the woods.

Why are GGZ files less fragile? They're potentially huge so they should be more fragile and not less, right? No.
The GGZ files are a zip of several files. There's a little file that's super fast and easy to parse and then there are little GPX files that contain the PQs as always. The little files contain lat, lon, cache type, and container size - just enough to splash stuff on a screen. This file is read on boot. Inside this file is also an index offset to the individual geocache in the big file. The (potentially large and, uuuuh, creative) entries that contain the HTML thus don't have to be opened and parsed until you actually choose that entry from the screen and try to display it. It's possible that it'll crash then - my Oregon 600 does this pretty regularly - but since it doesn't have to read the big file every time on boot, it's less likely to enter a boot loop. It's also possible/hopeful that it'd be a better user experience if they can associate "my Oregon crashes when I try to open GCwhatever" as a shorter action/response loop than it crashing when booting.

I think if we were making GPX (and pocket queries and GPS receivers) today, we'd have done something like mail and include both rich HTML (for something like an Android or iOS that has the RAM and software chops to pull it off) and a markdown-based text format because that can be formatted so easily and even if you do nothing, it looks pretty good. It's closer to the bbcode which, oddly, leaks into the logs sometimes.

There's been a lot of user frustration because the problems above come and go over time. A PQ today may or may not work next week. In today's world of auto-updating everything, it's hard to know what changed, but the GPX specification includes tips on automatically validating the XML (validating HTML is a problem addressed by groups many, many times our size) so that we can easily identify if we have a "bad" file being generated or it's the fault of the reader. The PQ generator hasn't always followed industry best practices.

While I know my meds make me rambly at night, this has been a huge pet peeve of mine for many years. So while I've barely been caching in recent years - certainly not since my recent round of spinal surgeries - it's something I've thought about for a long time. 


To the OP's question, I think the prescriptions written by our regulars are spot on: either you have corruption somewhere - a bad PQ itself or junk written into flash during an abrupt power - and a full reset will cure it or, less likely, you have slightly broken hardware. Good luck.

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It is not a GPX issue. I was able to reproduce this behavior with ZERO GPX/GGZ and the SQL rebuilt from scratch.

 

I believe it is a corrupt profile configuration setting. I had this same issue weeks ago, had to create/use a new profile, and all was well until a few days ago when I tried to search for a chirp, now same behavior again....

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On 15-6-2018 at 5:52 PM, AlexUK51 said:

My Oregon 700 has suddenly decided to spontaneously shut itself down after about 30 seconds from starting up. I have tried going into Settings to check if anything is amiss but am timed out before I can do this. I have tried changing batteries but this doesn't fix it.

Has anyone had experience of this and can suggest a solution?

Many thanks,

Alex

A few weeks ago i had the same probleem while geocaching. My Oregon 700 was working fine.I was trying to find a chirp cache, so i turned the chirp function on in my settings. After about 20-30 sec my Oregon stopped working and each time after i turned on my gps it shut down after aprox.20 sec.

Turning the chirp function Off again solved my problem.

A friend cacher had the same problem and it was solved by turning off the chirp function.

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3 hours ago, Emant68 said:

A few weeks ago i had the same probleem while geocaching. My Oregon 700 was working fine.I was trying to find a chirp cache, so i turned the chirp function on in my settings. After about 20-30 sec my Oregon stopped working and each time after i turned on my gps it shut down after aprox.20 sec.

Turning the chirp function Off again solved my problem.

A friend cacher had the same problem and it was solved by turning off the chirp function.

 

I never use the chirp function but I guess it's possible it got turned on accidentally.

 

However, I have now followed the advice of Mineral2 and deleted all the gpx files and performed a master reset.

As far as I can tell this has solved the problem  -  at the moment the unit is working correctly.

 

Thank you to all who have contributed their ideas and suggestions.

 

Alex

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On 16/06/2018 at 9:39 PM, AlexUK51 said:

 

I never use the chirp function but I guess it's possible it got turned on accidentally.

 

However, I have now followed the advice of Mineral2 and deleted all the gpx files and performed a master reset.

As far as I can tell this has solved the problem  -  at the moment the unit is working correctly.

 

Thank you to all who have contributed their ideas and suggestions.

 

Alex

I was at the Mega in Yorkshire last week and suddenly, half way round a series, my Oregon 750 turned off. I changed batteries several times but after that it would only boot and then turn itself off after 45-60 secs. Turning off Chirp today has stopped that behaviour but does mean I won't be able to use the Chirp function if I ever need it. A bit silly really!

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7 hours ago, prawm said:

I was at the Mega in Yorkshire last week and suddenly, half way round a series, my Oregon 750 turned off. I changed batteries several times but after that it would only boot and then turn itself off after 45-60 secs. Turning off Chirp today has stopped that behaviour but does mean I won't be able to use the Chirp function if I ever need it. A bit silly really!

 

These are known issues with firmware 4.00: GPSrChive.com > Oregon 7x0 > Common Issues > {Crash 02} or {Crash 03}.

 

PLEASE contact Garmin (product.support@garmin.com) and report these issues if you want them fixed. Development of the Oregon 7x0 has slowed dramatically and the units will likely see very few additional firmware releases.

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