Factory Reset Failure

[Devon Johnson]

Greetings,

I have an ISMS SF800 which is not responding to the factory reset button (powered on and held for close to 1 minute). My other two SF800’s take roughly 6 seconds for the reset to take affect.

I was wondering if there was another non-documented reset mechanism other than holding the button or if a particular proceedure (i.e. hold reset during power up) that might be effective.

The unit powers on, the status light blinks initially and then remains solid (never begins blinking again), the modem lights switch over, and seem to monitor. There are no SIMs in the slots (I removed them trying to troubleshoot what might be happening).

One note, the status light (mentioned above) stays solid after a reasonable amount of time and never begins blinking like the other two SF800 units.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Devon

[Bryon Davis]

Hi Devon,
It sounds like the SF800 isn’t getting far enough into its boot where it would recognize the reset button being held and perform the factory default. The best course of action would be to create a case at support.multitech.com, they will be able to follow up better on troubleshooting this problem.

Regards,
Bryon

[Devon Johnson]

Thanks for the advice. It looks like that was true (the unit not completely booting up). I talked to another guy who uses these and he said that the compact flash might be the issue. I took one of the other CF cards from another unit and the “failing” unit works well now.

I’ll try and track down a CF/memory card multi reader to see if there’s anything I can do to “revive” it, but it was mentioned that it’s possible that the cards can get full and it prevents the unit from starting up properly. Evidently it will only take 1GB or 2GB cards, the larger ones won’t work.

[Devon Johnson]

Thought I’d post an update. After the unit not booting (Status LED dark, then lit and not continuing to blinking), I found my trusty $10 multi card reader and plugged the CF card in.

Windows didn’t like it and so I used a program to look at the files on the drive: http://www.z-a-recovery.com . After looking at a good card, I noticed the multitech banner jpg files weren’t there. Soooo…

I tried to format the drive with windows thinking the SF800 unit should detect a blank card and reformat the drive. This didn’t work even though I did a complete windows format (not quick format).

I then took a card out of a working unit and copied the contents with this program: http://hddguru.com/software/HDD-Raw-Copy-Tool/
Then inserted the “bad” card and copied the contents back on to the “bad” card and tried it out. Voila! It works great.

You may also be able to achieve the same results if you do a “true” format and zero the card out, but I haven’t tried that right now.

Anyway hope that helps someone out there recover their SF400/SF800 Multitech ISMS modem if they find they have a bad Compact Flash (CF) and won’t startup.

Thanks,
Devon

[Bryon Davis]

Hi Devon,
You could’ve also just inserted the blank compact flash into the iSMS. When the iSMS boots up it will detect the blank compact flash and automatically format and replace the needed files. But all settings will be factory default and any history and logs will be blank.

Using the multi-card card reader may allow you to recover the settings and logs, depending on how intact the original CF data is.

Regards,
Bryon

[Devon Johnson]

Hi Bryon,

I agree that the iSMS “should” have detected the blank card (I’ve been advised that), but in reality, I took the “bad” card and formatted it with Windows which explicitly speaking isn’t blank. I think that I formatted it in FAT16, but I’m not sure.

So when I inserted the formatted card, the iSMS didn’t seem to format the card (I waited 30 minutes in case it was particularly slow). Had I zero-ed the card out rather than formatting the card, that may have worked.

Also, I suppose it is interesting that since I copied the image, I know have a working default image sitting on my hard drive for future uses in case I need to reset another card.

Either way, if people are throwing out “bad” CF cards they might try this trick to see if they can get a little more life.

Thanks for the help and have a good one,
Devon

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