Nuvi spontaneous memory loss

Can you give a few more details such as:

what kind of nuvi do you have?
what have you done to try to recover?
what has Gamin support told you?

There are many folks here in the community that probably have your Nuvi model and might be able to help you, but will just need more information to do so.

any uupdates?

Nuvi 360 na
I have not done anything except turn on the unit and look in all the available places. I don't want to make things worse by doing the wrong thing.
Garmin support does not directly respond - -instead, they send directions on how to back up info. It's like a stock response with no advice on how to get into the backup memory on the unit itself. I have asked to be referred to someone higher up but each time get the same stock response.
Thanks - I know it's in there somewhere and would appreciate any advice on how to find it.

Here's my suggestion:

Go to www.convar.de/. This is a German company so select the English version (EN) of the website. Go to the Freeware page of the Downloads. Select freeware called PC File Recovery. [Just be aware that social engineering is a tactic used by black hats so you might want to do some research on this company before you download. Alternatively, if you have all of your patches up-to-date and a good antivirus program, you'll probably be alright.]

Expand the zipped file and install the program. Plug your Garmin to the computer and open the File Recovery program. Navigate to the G: directory or to whichever directory the Garmin appears. Click on the Deleted folder.

You should be able to see the deleted files and the condition of the files, which is also the likeihood of recovery. Select a location to save the file, typically the source destination and target destination should not be the same.

Hope this helps.

You can get Recuva from Piriform, a trusted company. The link is: http://www.piriform.com/recuva

You have to pay for it but it is good. I have recovered files from hard drives, removable media that was damaged (won't recover from physically damaged area) and memory cards.

http://www.recovermyfiles.com/

I have Recuva and had my 765T already hooked up and tried to recover from my G:\Garmin Nuvi.

Looks like I could get a bunch of files back, so Juggernaut has the right idea.

Agree Piriform is trusted - many magazines recommend it's products.

This is good info for all of us to know and have tried. My advice is go do it right now.

fingers crossed that I can recover the files - will try the trusted site first.

I assume I can never put them back on the Nuvi, correct?
I'll see if I can find them then may need assistance in transferring them.

I am eternally grateful - thank you all

Recuva can be a god send.

What is "social engineering" and who or what are the "black hats?"

dobs108

He refers to a group of hackers and the methods they use to attempt to gain access to your accounts and by extension, your life.

Not all hackers or hacks are bad, regardless of how the software industry wants to portray it.

Hackers are also the guys that reverse engineer software, figure out the weaknesses, and then engineer fixes to patch the weakness.
The software industry portrays them as malevolent because that's easier than admitting they do a bad job of securing things like apps and OS's.

+1

There are probably others here more knowledgeable than me on this subject but I’ll attempt an explanation with my limited understanding. Of course, search engines like Google can provide more info.

Some of the old westerns followed the formula of white hats represent the good guys while the black hats represent the villains. Likewise, the black hats are people with nefarious purpose who seek access to steal information and/or hijack your computer.

Social engineering represents just another weak link in the security system that consists of you and your computer. I’ll provide some simplified examples.

You receive an attachment in an email by someone masquerading as a known party or the subject line of the email appears innocuous or interesting. You open the attachment and execute a virus.

You visit a website that hosts exploits of unpatched vulnerabilities in your software. The simple act of visiting the site is enough for someone to gain access to your system.

You visit a website that hosts malware but you are required to execute a command that injects code into your system.

The first and third examples use social engineering which simply are actions you take on your part that willingly lead to a compromised system.

What should you do to protect yourself?

Use an antivirus program.

Patch your operating system and software. Typically, users patch the OS and perhaps the web browsers but may not remember to include third party software such as Adobe (Acrobat Reader, Shockwave, Flash), Apple (ITunes, Quicktime), and Sun Java.

Avoid suspect sites. Be aware that there are known unpatched exploits for Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 and Mozilla Firefox v 3.6.6.

Here’s an overview of some of what I’ve mentioned: http://www.cert.org/. You might also consider signing up to a feed or email alerts from http://www.us-cert.gov/.

FINALLY finding time to attempt to recover the files. Have downloaded recuva, but when I get to the nuvi 360 I'm faced with many choices - where would I likely find my files? First the list includes Garmin and Autorun. I picked Garmin, then was given these to choose from: Garmin Device; gmapprom;gmappromgma; gmappromunl; prodkeyNA.bin; prodkey.bin; GUPDATE.GCD; 006B048201.bin; gmapprom.sum; 006B047800.bin; gmapbmap; nuvi_drive; dpx; Diag; Help; RemoteSW; vehicle; Voice;
I am feeling very stupid in this regard - I obviously feel I can eliminate some choices eg vehicle and voice, but would appreciate further advice on where to look when I attempt to recover the deleted files using Recuva.

Again, thanks for all the great guidance. Hopefully today will be the day I find the deleted files.

Also, right after I plug it into my laptop, I'm asked if I want to scan and fix?? I will initially skip this step because I don't want to further complicate finding my lost files, but should I do this later?

Had it happen after a DownGrade of firmware.....
But not on it's own..... Nuvi 660
(downgraded to avoid a Traffic display bug, that was fixed with latest firmware.....)

If you look hard enough in this folder, you'll find my post about this happening... where someone indicated the filename and location of the 'Favorites' file.... Which I want to save in another directory once I get all my Favorites loaded back into unit -- I've been lazy.......

I've read this thread several times but still can't figure out what files you're looking to recover. Since your original post says that you lost everything in the flash memory, I suppose you'd want to recover everything that the software finds.

Use the Quick-Start Wizard, and follow the prompts. Let Recuva scan the nuvi drive. After it finds all files, save them to a folder on the computer.

After that, you'll need to look for the missing files ONLY. That is, the map and system files.

Then, come back here to get help on where to put the files. They have to go in the correct location.

Do not scan and fix for now.

I used the wizard. The only thing it came up with was a jpeg image of an mp3 option. dang. more suggestions please. thank you.

Did you try a deep scan on the nuvi drive?

What about the ones you mentioned earlier?

•Garmin Device; gmapprom;gmappromgma; gmappromunl; prodkeyNA.bin; prodkey.bin; GUPDATE.GCD; 006B048201.bin; gmapprom.sum; 006B047800.bin; gmapbmap; nuvi_drive; dpx; Diag; Help; RemoteSW; vehicle; Voice;

I want to recover all my favorites and recent selections or whatever it's called - basically everything I ever saved or used on the gps
thanks
Recuva found only a couple of images, so I welcome advice on what to do next.
Very depressing.....

If it's been over-written on the same space (sectors) of the drive, not much will recover it

yes, I tried a deep scan which took close to 45 minutes - the only things it found were two images.
How do I have recuva access those in the list I mentioned, that you pasted in to your response. And which of those should I try to look into?
thank you so very, very much.

You said in the post you picked 'Garmin'...

I have not used, except in one brief
instance when I discovered the memory loss, the nuvi since this occured. I did not want to rish an overwrite, but really obviously don't understand how all this works. I am willing to try other means and want to stick with it until I find it. Do you think if I pay to use http://www.recovermyfiles.com/
suggested by another poster that they may find data recuva was unable to access?? Or any other suggestions?

when I used the wizard it showed my varioous drives and I picked Garmin - it did not allow me to go further within Garmin - it just started scanning

Let it scan and see what it finds. Not sure about the other product, as I've never used it. A big IF, perhaps? Depends on how desperate you are? Hmm.

in a few hours - was hoping to have some files by now but will not give up!! Of the list, can you suggest which ones I should try to look through? Ill see if it lets me go beyond the garmin overall to within.
thank you again

Look for all of them. Scan the root drive of the nuvi (the main drive)

I'm not sure we are giving as good a set of instructions as we can.

I just did a run of Recuva on my 765T. When I fire up recuva, I get a welcome screen. when I press next I get a dialog screen asking me what "file type" I want to recover. Pictures is the default on my Recuva - which might explaing why you were finding only jpegs.

I checked "other" at the bottom if the list of file types - this looks at all files - and then pressed Next.

This brings up a "file location" dialog. I clicked the "In a specific location" radio button and then navigated to the "Garmin Nuvi" (which on my computer was assigned to drive G:. Then I pressed next.

For this report, I selecteed "enable deep scan" and then clicked Start.

My report said that Recuva found 71 files in 467 seconds (a littles less that 8 minutes). Most of the files were unrecoverable because they were old "poi.gpi" files which was expected since every time I run POI Loader, it overwrites the previous poi.gpi file.

I hope this report will help other use Recuva as an exercise in preparation for the time when they do something they wish they hadn't.

Have we mentioned that you ought to make a full backup of your GPS unit?

I had done what you suggested - had it search all, etc, but each time it came up with the same two images only - nothing else. When I looked the to right, it said the files are overwritten - so what program can I use to dig deeper?

As I said, the only overwriting was when I went to access something, and realized all my favorites and recent places had disappeared.

Thank you all - I will persist.
And once I recover, I now know to backup GPS unit on a regular basis.

JanJ,
I would love to try what you did to find the favorites, and hopefully, recent locations, but can not find the post you are referring to. Can you guess what the title was? or other way to find it? thanks

As I said above, if it's been over-written on the same space of the drive, not much will recover it. Nothing I know of. Sorry, friend.

Since you data is so important I would ask for a supervisor if they keep giving you a stock response. they should have the power to escalate you issue to a dept that does this kind of recovery. I'm sure you are not the first person to loose all their data. Also call them during normal working hours so you get the most competent techs. I used to work in a call center and the most senior tech get the best schedules.

I am working with recovermyfiles.com and they need to know the file type the favorites are stored in and the folder location

thank you

http://www.recovermyfiles.com/
I just spent the last several hours working with a man named Graham at recovermyfiles.com live chat. He was tenacious and curious - kept trying different things and found my information!!! Amazing experience - I would highly recommend these people - if you want to find your data it is well worth it.
Now, files are all in kind of random form in a folder on my desktop- I assume the only way to get them back on the nuvi is to manually enter each one?? He finally found them by looking at computer forensics advice, and searching for .txt files.
Kudos to this Australian company!!!

thanos,
thank you for recommending this great resource - I have been working on this recovery for about the last 7 hours and thanks to a wonderful support person in Australia was able to recover quite a bit of information.

I too have been observing this thread, and wasn't sure what exactly you wanted to recover. I'm assuming you want to recover names, addresses and other information that you stored in your Nuvi's "Favorites"? Unfortunately, the Nuvi's Favorites are stored in internal memory that is not accessible from a PC.

However, a copy of these favorites is always placed in the file called "current.gpx". But that file gets overwritten every time the Nuvi is turned on and off. That will make it virtually unrecoverable, no matter what program you use. If recuva did not find a file called "current.gpx", then I doubt if recovermyfiles.com can find it. Anyway, a miracle might happen. The folder you should give it is \Garmin\gpx and the file type would be "text". Good luck.

Edit: My post crossed yours. I see you found your files. That's great. Considering the effort you put into this, there must be something specific you wanted to recover. I hope you got it.

Is you Nuvi working at all? Does it boot up? Do you have a map? The time and effort (and probably support costs) you put into this, plus the value of the data is probably more than the value of the Nuvi hardware. Again, I'm just guessing, but if you are after your old "Favorites", make sure that your Favorites are indeed in one of the files that was recovered to your desktop before doing anything else to the Nuvi. If you're running windows, I'd recommend using Wordpad, and opening each recovered file that has a .gpx extension to observe the contents. DO NOT SAVE THE FILE WHEN YOU EXIT WORDPAD. If the files lost their original names, and all you have are a bunch of random .txt files, open these one by one with Wordpad. You will immediately recognize the Favorites when you see it. Let this forum know what you find.

Having put about 10 hours minimum into this, I now give up.
My only advice is to save everything you care about - the recent locations, which I still would like to access, seem impossible to find. BUT ANYTHING I HAD PREVIOUSLY SAVED IS NOW AVAILABLE TO ME, ALBEIT IN GOBBLED FORM. BUT IT'S THERE!!!

I spent the last hour plus on phone with garmin tech, who gave me more file extensions to search. Despite trying these new extensions, the same txt files I found before, my favorites, again show up. He would not transfer me up to anyone else, but did put me on hold several to consult with their tech team. I STILL KNOW IT'S IN THERE SOMEWHERE, AND IF LAW ENFORCEMENT WANTED IT, THEY'D GET IT. However, he says that would come at great expense and involve opening the unit to extract directly from the hard drive, that there's no way short of that to find the recent places as it's considered temp info. whew.
So now I need to figure out how to backup the garmin occasionally. That's the next project, but for now, on to other things.

What a process - thanks everyone for all the help, and now I know how to hack into lost info, so the extra hours were educational at the least.

Your post makes me feel as though I am seriously not maximizing on my GPS usage.

I usually don't get a belly-ache laugh, but I just got an uncontrollable one right now. Thanks for the de-stressor!