Persistent Fatal Alerts-- Need Help!

[Unregistered]

I have been using a Sony Clie T665C for a few months only and had to do hard resets at least 5 times already, the last three occurring yesterday and today. These recent troubles happened while the Clie was doing some cleaning up process near the end of a hotsync. The error message was

Fatal Alert

DateDB.c, Line:2537. An earlier alarm was found in skipped records.

Soft resets were of no use: the same error kept coming back. I had to do a hard reset. It looks likely that I have to do a hard reset for every hotsync unless I could get to the source of the problem.

It seems incredible to me that a piece of bad data(?) in a DateBook record can cause the OS to crash (as implied by the error message above)! Is Palm OS 4.1 so fragile??? Or did I miss something?

Any info on what really happened, or help that will prevent this from happening again will be much appreciated. TIA!

[davidrgeorge]

Download DB Scan from Pimlico (SP?). It will do a check on your address book entries for errors. I used to have this problem a lot too. Backups/Restores using the memory stick work great! I haven't had to do a restore though since I started using DB Scan.

[zeta]

Thank you very much, David.
I have just downloaded and installed dbScan from freewarepalm. Did a hotsync, and several inconsistencies in my datebook and todo list came up. These were probably due to some deletions I did in Microsoft Outlook and the Clie yesterday after posting the above message (in an effort to try to solve the problem).

In any case, I did not get the fatal reset error during this hotsync. I ran dbScan after the hotsync and it reported no errors now. I'll run dbScan regularly to keep the db clean.

Thanks again for the kind reply.

[wellsjs]

It's never wise to delete a datebook or todo item in both your desktop application and your PDA. Since the sync goes both ways, both of them are trying to perform a delete call at the same time, and they can get angry with one another! :D

[zeta]

Thank you John.
I am a fairly new user of a Clie (my first ever PDA). I use IntelliSync and set options for conflict resolution. I presume any inconsistencies/conflicts due to deletion would be caught by IntelliSync and I have a choice of several actions to take (update, ignore, etc) in case of conflicts. Just before my problems occurred, the hotsyncs appeared to run ok: no report of conflicts or inconsistencies from IntelliSync. But trouble started when the PDA was going through some cleaning up process.
In a desperate attempt to try to solve the problem, I resorted to deleting some items from both MS Outlook and the Clie. I probably deleted, by chance, the corrupted record(s)!

Any idea why this can cause the OS to fail? I can understand why an errant and badly written program can cause serious problems but I am very puzzled that a piece of user data has such a serious effect on a seemingly well-established (?) OS.

[zeta]

I have never programmed for a PDA. Could it be that DateDB.c (I presume it is a C program) was not well-written and had some stray pointers that cause the OS to crash when confronted with corrupted data? Any info would be much appreciated.

[Japorms]

can anyone post the url of db scan? ty

[Jake K]

http://www.palmgear.com/software/showsoftware.cfm?prodID=2351

Next time, try google.com

[wellsjs]

zeta,

Being an IT manager, I can talk about code but I don't know code! :D You know how us types are! :D Can't answer your question technically. The DateDB.c database obviously is not very fault tolerant. But then I would be skeptical of placing all the blame on this little jewel, because Intellisync always has been buggy as well.