Pixelar crashed and not responding to CPR!

[rainbowworrier]

I bought a Hanlin 6" from Pixelar last week. I have been trying it out with all the ebooks I had to hand. Most, admittedly were PDFs and most very poorly formatted, which caused the ereader to crash regularly and return to the top menu.

Part way through another poorly-formatted PDF it froze. When I tried to turn the page it clicked at me like an angry guinea pig, the green light turned red for a second but nothing happened. Ditto when I tried to turn it off. Ditto when I pressed the reset button with a pin. In desperation I have removed the battery but even that doesn't help - after a day it still is stuck on the page it crashed at. It must have enough stored charge to keep it going longer than my patience can hold out.

My husband (laughing heartily, he doesn't trust ebooks) says I need to send it back, but I am away for the weekend and would like to fix it before I get home. Any suggestions?

I haven't downloaded any firmware upgrades for fear of invalidating the guarantee, which it seems quite likely I shall be needing!

Thanks in advance!

[rainbowworrier]

Update: we got it breathing again by plugging it back into the pc. I have deleted all PDFs off the memory and removed the SD card.

I have also now read the warnings about unplugging it without going through the safely remove hardware process.

My husband says he will try to back up the software in case we need to reformat the disk.

Why is none of this mentioned in the manual???

[Dave_S]

Originally Posted by rainbowworrier

Update: we got it breathing again by plugging it back into the pc.

Glad you got it working again!
Getting stuck at the page of the last crash usually indicates that the reader did not have enough battery power to restart. An e-ink screen can hold it's last image forever with no battery power. Also, the fact that you were able to recover by connecting to the external USB power is another indication of a low battery state.

Originally Posted by rainbowworrier

I have also now read the warnings about unplugging it without going through the safely remove hardware process.

There are other ways, but that one is a good one.

Originally Posted by rainbowworrier

My husband says he will try to back up the software in case we need to reformat the disk.

Reformatting the disk will not cause a loss of software, since the "software" is actually "firmware" stored in FLASH memory. Reformatting the disk will cause a loss of ALL books on the reader, so your books should be backed up.

Originally Posted by rainbowworrier

Why is none of this mentioned in the manual???

Good question!