Monday, October 30, 2006

Palm crashes and dies .. "Fatal Alert"

So I'm synching my Palm T2. Routine stuff. Abruptly, sync terminates with a well named message "Fatal Alert". The Palm was completely unresponsive -- the standard reset button did nothing.

Impressive! A search on the details (VFSDBCache.c, "found trailing records after dir sync") returned only one one reference and it's not applicable.

I played with a warm reset (push navigator up, while pressing reset) and rocked the navigator up and down with the memory card remove. It finally reset. A resync (outlook overwrite handheld) worked fine.

I suspect a problem with Palm's cruddy connector caused a communications flaw during synchronization. They could have used a reliable USB mini-B like the Tungsten T and Blackberry, but, no, they had delusions of grandeur ....

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