Hi, I spent two days fighting with my reader and reading lots of threads trying to fix my reader which was completely freezed in the start up screen. I am in caracas so i couldnt even return it so i was pretty pissed off, specially because this is my second unit ( the first one died on me after a couple of weeks i got it and had to return it) since this forum was helpfull though i didnt find the specific solution i want to collaborate with my experience.

One morning i found the reader on the start up screen, i couldnt soft or hard reset it, and it didnt show on three different computers. looking here i decided to charge it overnight (actually im not that patient i tried resetting it like a hundred times then i quit and charge it overnight).

Next morning was the same but i noticed that if i pressed reset then turn it on it would try to function then it would die again. did this like ten times but nothing.

I had no books in the unit they were all in the mmc card (may be the problem) still the first thing i did was to remove the card.

Then i realized that if i resetted the unit then turn it on then plug it in the computer it would show in my pc.

So i formatted everything. the reader and the mmc card, i used fast format in fat 32. I thought that would destroy the software and lost the reader for ever but i was desperate.

When I unplugged.... IT WORKED!! awesome i heard angels singing.

I inmediately put back 100 books in rtf in the mmc card and internal memory (270mb)

So far it is still working, i still dont know what went wrong in the first place maybe because i didnt use the library to upload the books in the mmc card. maybe the mmc card is not fully suported (it had worked well for 5 months). Maybe a virus (my pc shows a trojan once in a while). Could have also been that i ran completely out of battery and that messed up the software (the bar was full though). Anyway now it is working and i hope this comment helps someone who has the same problem. :thumbsup:

I didnt try the firmware update or the unbricking metod because the instruccions in the wiki page shows steps for a 500 and mine is a 505 by the way.

pd. I have like 120 rtf books in spanish (well formatted with autor and title) mostly history if any spanish speaking people want to exchange out there.

After uploading books i found a virus in the mmc card, could this have been the problem?

possibly....I had a goofy ebook file lock my reader up once

It might have been the virus, but it was probably just the internal memory not formatted properly or something silly like that :) .


I dont have any spanish ebooks i could trade, sorry.

Btw i live in Maturin :)

Could have been the virus causing the file system to be corrupted.

How to format sony reader , fast format 32?

any utility or from Disk Management in windows xp ?

Hi Freidenker,
I have a question about your problem when did your reader stop trying to Start up?
Mine is frozen starting up and reset it does not make any difference. I have it now charging with the PC and after resetting it shows the red light charging but it keeps saying "Starting up". The PC does not show the reader as connected. Any clue?

Thanks

Hi Freidenker,
I have a question about your problem when did your reader stop trying to Start up?
Mine is frozen starting up and reset it does not make any difference. I have it now charging with the PC and after resetting it shows the red light charging but it keeps saying "Starting up". The PC does not show the reader as connected. Any clue?

Thanks

Try an overnight mains recharge, perhaps?

Try an overnight mains recharge, perhaps?
Looks like you may need to try that overnight charge using an AC adapter. You can get a PSP AC adapter (not one that plugs ito the USB port) and use that to give it a charge.

Hello. Just checked my emails, let me try to remember, when it froze in the start up screen at first it wouldnt show up in the pc either. I think what i did (after the full recharge with an ac adapter, the ones used in diskmans and other stuff) was to push the reset button a lot of times cause i saw the orange light going on when i pushed it (at this point i was looking for any sort of reaction).

Finally i think i reseted it while pluged to the pc and it showed in windows. I thought it was fixed but when i unpluged it, it went to the start up screen all over again. I repeated the whole process until it showed in my pc again, and this time I used the full format as if it were a pen-drive. when i unpluged it, it worked!

This was some sort of a miracle, there was no reasoning behind my trying to fix it. Also, i have two computers at home, and one in my job, and i think i used the three of them, and only my work´s one worked. I don´t really know if this has something to do, but right now i have a bad pen drive and it shows in some pc but not in others, so... anyway... good luck.

Thanks all for the reply the problem was fixed after some hours charging through the USB wire connected to a PC.

Almost for sure everybody already knows but do NOT try to charge the reader with a power charger connected through the USB connector. It will only cause problems.