Mac OS X killed my Garmin!

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My GPSMAP 60CSx had started to become unreliable: crashing after startup, randomly locking up in mid route, and just generally being an aggravating piece of kit. I was really close to replacing it.

The problem seemed to appear after I’d used USB Mass Storage to transfer archived track logs to the computer. As a last resort, I tried removing the hidden files that OS X creates on every removable disk, and now all is well. It’s annoying and inexcusable that Apple chooses to do this, but we work around.

To delete these files from the terminal and eject the device safely, enter these commands:

pushd /Volumes/GARMIN/
rm -rf .Spotlight-V100 .Trashes ._.Trashes .fseventsd
popd
disktool -e disk1

Your device might not be called /Volumes/GARMIN/, so check and change appropriately. If you have multiple drives on your machine, your GPS is probably not the disk1 device. You can find out which it is by entering disktool -l.

Comments

10 Responses to “Mac OS X killed my Garmin!”

2010-09-15

hyrcan

Those files are annoying to have to clean up, but why is Garmin choking on files that don’t conflict with there’s system files and shouldn’t care about?

Btw, check out http://www.zeroonetwenty.com/blueharvest/ pretty handy at managing these things automagicly.
2010-09-15

Firefishy

I had the same problem with my 60csx. I also did a full setting reset and all was back to normal.
2010-09-15

Just van den Broecke

I had this same problem initially with my Garmin Etrex Legend HCx. It disappeared after one of the firmware upgrades through Garmin Webupdater app for Mac. There is also a setting to prevent Apple Spotlight from indexing an attached USB drive:

sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes//GARMIN
2010-09-15

flabot

or drop a .metadata_never_index-file on a fresh SD-card.

—
http://toolserver.org/~flacus/OSM/
2010-09-15

scruss

Blueharvest costs money. This doesn’t.

Firefishy, I did the same, but the problems happened again after using USB mass storage mode. I’m also using the latest firmware.
2010-09-15

erik

Can someone give me a hand? I tried to add 4 wind towers in Fortaleza, Brazil (my birth town), and I couldn’t get the right icons to appear. And I think the tags are right, but I’m a newbie.
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=-3.70159&lon=-38.47481&zoom=17
2010-09-15

Robbie

Thanks for thins bit of information. I am on holiday in Menorca and noticed my 60csx was acting up today. I had downloaded track logs yesterday for geotagging on the MacBook Pro. Normally not a problem at home as I have Blue Harvest on the Mac Pro so the problem hasn’t t materialized before. I have just cleaned the Garmin with a newly installed Blue Harvest so hopefully should be ok now. Thanks once again, saved me a lot of head scratching.
2010-09-15

scruss

You got it, Erik!
2010-10-07

guido

On http://WWW.javawa.nl you can download clean eject.
2010-10-11

scruss

Guido, that works really well. Thanks!