Symbian (Nokia E61) and Navigator 6 problem fix

[quentinsf]

Since upgrading the firmware on my Nokia E61 (originally to v2 and now on version 3), I hadn't been able to get TomTom working. Two weeks of to-and-fro with the TomTom support people didn't help. I had to start by explaining to them the difference between Pocket PC and Symbian...

But I fixed it in the end, so just in case anybody finds themselves in the same position...

My problem was that I could get the app to start once after a clean installation, but it would then refuse to start again. It would flash briefly and the drop me back into the standby screen.

I think I've found the problem, by doing lots of 'before and after' analysis.

On the SD card, there's a file in the GB_plus_major_roads_of_WE directory called "cline.dat".

When the application is first run - I imagine it's part of the registration process - this file gets corrupted. The application then won't run again. This is repeatable, and may affect anybody running on the E61 with up-to-date firmware, I suspect.

Here's what I did to fix it:

I did a completely clean install, including formatting the SD card and deleting everything from the phone's internal memory that looked as if it might relate to TomTom (using Y-Browser).

I used TomTom Home on my Mac to do the install directly onto the card, using a card reader.

I then (using my Linux machine) made a complete copy of the SD card *before* running the program. Could probably have done this just as well on the Mac.

I put the card back into the phone, used App Manager to install the TomTom program and ran it, went through the registration process etc and it all worked OK until I exited the program and tried to come back into it, after which it died.

So I made another copy of the card and compared the before and after directories (using the very nice 'meld' program on Linux) to see which files had changed. There were a few, including cline.dat.

When I copied my original capture of cline.dat back onto the card, things started working again.

I've also kept a second copy of the file on the SD card, so I can use Y-Browser to fix the installation if it happens again when I'm away from home.

Hope this is useful to somebody!

[quentinsf]

Dear all,

Please ignore all of the above!
I think I may have tracked this down to a faulty Kingston mini-SD card.

Things seemed to be behaving so non-deterministically that I began to wonder if the hardware was faulty, and, sure enough, since buying a new card, I haven't seen the problem recur.

Memory failure is so rare these days that I always tend to assume something else is at fault...