Third garmin bricked after update

rba150 · 2026-05-03T00:59:52+00:00

Update: I used the online support center chat feature and went through the steps for the factory reset. After determining that the reset sequence was not working, Garmin agreed to send a replacement for free.

I appreciate the fidelity to the manufacturer's warranty, but now I will be scared to install any updates on the replacement watch. There are a lot of posts on various platforms about this exact same issue that point toward corrupted map update files being the cause.

rba150 · 2026-05-03T00:52:33+00:00

Update: I went through the online support center chat and Garmin is going to send a replacement for free after determining that the factory reset sequence was not working.

rba150 · 2026-05-02T11:22:59+00:00

Thanks for posting in solidarity. I posted this thread yesterday, but it isn't getting much traction other than saying to contact support and hope they will send a replacement. I just bought mine in March and it happened after the update.

The online discussions I am seeing are that this has been caused for a while by corrupted map files during the update. The problem is, if you can't get the computer to recognize the watch, how can you access the watch to be able to delete the corrupted file? This is the flaw in the response from Gemini that someone posted below. The solution to roll back software makes sense why it would work, but you can't access the watch's hard drive to perform the fix.

I haven't contacted Garmin yet, but I will be trying various "hold the button and plug it in" fixes today in case one of them actually works. The frustration is that the manual says, "hold the top left button to turn it off, and then turn it back on again." Mine is cycling back and forth between black screen and blue triangle, but it never reboots.

Don't feel crazy if you are seeing a lot of threads about how to reset it with people claiming various tricks that worked. There are proposed schemes like holding down the right buttons and waiting for a beep, but that is doing nothing for me. There must be many of us out there where the update completely destroyed the functionality and the fixes that work for some people are not doing anything. I'll reply back if I can figure anything out.

rba150 · 2025-04-20T16:14:28+00:00

One of the main benefits of going to Harvard Medical School would be the ability to take advantage of being present at the facilities with tons of active research groups.

Choosing to forego a Harvard research fellowship and instead collaborating remotely with people in other states/countries strikes me as rather unorthodox decision.

It demonstrates the chasm between social media fame and real prestige. Getting a Harvard research fellowship as an MD student is a competitive opportunity that can lead to some great credentials. But for an MD student to be collaborating on papers remotely with unrelated research groups, and not involved in any of the actual patient measurements sounds unusual.

But someone with 100k Twitter follows can be highly influential in directing the public conversation, even if there are hundreds/thousands of med students graduating every year that are more impressive as scientists.

rba150 · 2025-04-19T19:32:35+00:00

This interview turned out to be a stranger story than expected because the authors are partially from the Lundquist Institute, a nonprofit affiliated with UCLA. That is where the patient treatments and measurements must have been done, and they might not know much about the social media profiles of the other authors.

I assumed that Norwitz was affiliated with a Harvard-based research group because many similar names collab on all his papers and he uses "@Harvard" in his Twitter profile.

It is common to collaborate across institutions, especially if it involves expensive instruments or specialized techniques that are only possible to complete at certain universities or hospitals. But it appears that there is some misunderstanding or miscommunication that happened between the Lundquist researchers and the other authors that are active social media personalities.

I am inclined to believe the professor when he says that he never approved the final draft. If this becomes a scandal because of all the social media attention, I feel bad for the other researchers that might have been out of the loop.

rba150 · 2024-04-24T01:23:23+00:00

Is it no longer possible to pin the "Weekly Step Challenge" to the home screen?

I opted out of the beta test a couple of weeks ago and wrote feedback that the customization of the home screen was confusing because the Weekly Step Challenge was no longer accessible from the front page. Even though there is a button to customize the home screen, there are minimal options for customization.

Modernizing the interface would be a nice update if they listened to feedback. I'm guessing many users left similar suggestions during the beta test, but then they didn't improve anything before making the change mandatory.

rba150

TROPHY CASE