My 6000 bricked, temporarily

[DrWowe]

Last night, I left my Z on, and not plugged in.  I didn\'t worry too much about it because I figured the auto-shut off would take care of it.  This morning, when I tried to turn it on, it wouldn\'t.  I plugged it in and the charging light came on, but it still wouldn\'t turn on.  So I hit the reset button.  No joy.  Then I removed the battery and the power cord, turned the backup battery switch off, left it like that for a minute, plugged everything back in, and turned it on again.  Still nothing.  Getting a little panicky, I hit the reset switch like 50 times in a row, with various combinations of other buttons pressed, still the machine remained dark.

Leaving it plugged in for a while, thinking about sending it back to Amazon, I went away for a while.  I came back a half hour later, and it started up and went through the boot sequence.  I unplugged it for a moment and saw that the battery was pretty much drained.

I draw two conclusions from this:

1)  Don\'t rely on auto-shutoff.  It doesn\'t work.
2)  The 6000 can\'t start up if the battery is drained.  Even when plugged in.

[Ethereal]

1)  Don\'t rely on auto-shutoff.  It doesn\'t work.

Not to insult your intelligence, but are you sure all the power management stuff was configured correctly?  If so, this is not a trivial issue: a high-end battery-operated device with no fail-safe for preventing an inadvertently dead battery?

[piggity]

I had the same issue as \"2) The 6000 can\'t start up if the battery is drained. Even when plugged in.\" with a C860.  I let the battery go completly dead, plugged it in and it wouldn\'t start up for about 10 minutes.  After the batter charged for about ten minutes it turned on.  But it would not turn on being plugged into the wall with a dead battery.

[piggity]

my point was a wouldn\'t worry to much about it, unless it happens when the batter isn\'t completly dead.

[xamindar]

I remimber the manual for my 5600 also saying that the Z will not turn on if the battery is dead, even if it is plugged in.

[zbones]

This is a common way that others have permanently bricked their Z\'s.
Let it run down and then in a state of panick when it will not power up they attempt to reflash it with low power.

If your Z, (any model) fails to turn on, plug in the charger and leave it for 30 mins or so, then try and turn it on.

This is not unique to the Zaurus, my phone, camera, and camcorder all do this if the battery has been allowed to run down completely.

If the Z has to shutdown because of low power then it needs a charge fairly soon as the suspended state also uses power.

The best option is to set it to suspend when not used for ten mins or so.

[DrWowe]

The best option is to set it to suspend when not used for ten mins or so.

Yup, I have that setting.  But it apparently didn\'t work.  I don\'t know why.  I\'m going to do some testing of this feature at some point.

[jerbell]

My 6000 has also failed to suspend.  It turned off when the battery drained and then turned on with no problems after I pluged it in.

[maslovsky]

Recall which apps you have recentely installed  - they might have broken suspend for you

[cvmiller]

Recall which apps you have recentely installed  - they might have broken suspend for you

This may not be an App problem, but a Wireless Interface problem.

I had the same experience, left my SL-6000 on (with the wireless connected to my home network), and walked off and forgot about it. Came back and the battery was totally drained, and the SL-6000 wouldn\'t start.

However, when I am at work, with the wireless interface off, my Z suspends just fine.

Anyone else notice that the battery draining experience was with the wireless interface ON?

Craig...

[DrWowe]

Wireless interface was on in my case.  In fact, I think I had a ping running.

[benkrembs]

I noticed the same behavior on mine yesterday -- if the network is on, it doesn\'t suspend.

Kinda sucks, really... it\'s not like it doesn\'t suspend when a little low-power app is running, but when a power-hungry component is on.  That makes the problem much more annoying.

[treke]

I had the same issue as \"2) The 6000 can\'t start up if the battery is drained. Even when plugged in.\" with a C860.  I let the battery go completly dead, plugged it in and it wouldn\'t start up for about 10 minutes.  After the batter charged for about ten minutes it turned on.  But it would not turn on being plugged into the wall with a dead battery.

This is sort of a feature. The device wakes up, notices that it\'s horribly low on power, and goes right back to sleep again before doing things like turning the LCD back on. I dont know how hard it would be to pull that bit of code out of the kernel, but it\'s probably doable. Cant see it being all that helpful though

[benkrembs]

Well.. that \'Refusing To Start Unless The Battery Is Sorta Full\' feature is probably a Good Thing.  It probably helps make sure the battery doesn\'t get hammered really hard when it\'s low on power, things like that tend to royally screw up the battery\'s lifetime.

The real problem is the fact that the device doesn\'t sleep when the network is connected.  If you\'re going to dig into the kernal for anything... one should look into fixing that bug.

[gnarlog]

I too have a C860 with a totally drained battery. What really compounds my problem though is the fact that my Zaurus won\'t charge the battery for some reason. I\'ve tried different AC adapters, and even bought a replacement battery which worked briefly since the battery happened to have a little bit of charge, but I\'m once again in a position where I simply can\'t do anything with the machine except get to the service menus. On page 2, item 10 in the service menu, there is the \"power\" option. I clicked it, and it was set of \"off\". I set it on \"on\', and the battery charge light turned on, and stayed on until I turned it off again. I left it like that overnight, but it didn\'t charge the battery. Anyone have any similar experience? And does anyone know of a comprehensive document that covers the service menus?

Thanks,

Matt