daystrom

Many of us with a 2011 model year and Sync experience the Sync Blue Screen of Death at times. This BSOD causes sync to basically lock up, bluetooth drops the connection to your phone, and other oddities.

The common thing seems to be whethere or not you have a USB device plugged in at startup.

I've expeienced this very behaviour. When I first got my truck Sync ran fine even with a USB stick plugged in all the time. Over time (with more tunes added to the stick) Sync got more and more flaky, so bad that in the past week at each start of the truck, Sync would totally reboot itself. USB power was off, voice command button unresponsive, no Bluetooth connection. After a minute the USB port would power back up and things started to work somewhat again.

If I removed the USB stick, all was perfect each and every start.

This got me thinking - what if something was wrong on the USB stick? Is Sync's response to a problem a reboot?

So I pulled the USB stick and plugged it into my PC. The first thing I noticed was the length of time it took my PC to recognize/read the USB stick. Normally I would get some response from my PC within a second, this time it was more like 20 seconds.

My USB stick FWIW is a Sandisk Cruzer 16GB with 600 songs (about 5GB).

What I did seemed to fix the Sync reboot issue. I've been through about 12 start cycles with the USB stick plugged in and everything works like it should.

I simply ran a defrag utility on the USB stick. The stick was not that fragmented (1%) but simply doing this did something.

The built in defrag utility in Windows will not defrag removable devices so I found a freeware program that would.


More testing needs to be done to see if this is the problem so if anyone else has these Sync issues, please try defragmenting your memory stick/device and see if it helps.

There are many articles out there saying that deframentation is not necessary for USB memory sticks since it is truly random access. This is true but whatever it did seemed to help me.

Todd

superccs

Maybe it just needed to have scan disk run or something because solid state media does not benefit from defrag...only hard drives do. I might load some more tunes on and try this on my portable hdd though just to see the response.

Overall my sync has been pretty good.

RDFTS

iTrader: (1)

I've done the USB2 mod and have a 16gb plugged in all the time. I use USB in the dash to charge my phone only. Never had an issue so far.

Do you have the Nav unit?

I've had issues with SanDisk in the past with pc's and dont use that brand anymore. Does yours have U3, you might want to remove that

gutrrob

Can't wait to try it!

rm -rf

I've had a similar experience to daystom on a 16GB USB stick with about 4GB of songs. I doin't think it's fragged though, as I bought it new, copied the songs & stuck it itn the truck. There is no way that it could be fragmented.

When I experienced the flakyness as described by daystom (voice button didn't work, the only media that worked was AM/FM radio...) I:

Shut off the truck
Pulled out the USB stick
Started the truck (everything sync related worked)
Shut off the truck
Put the USB stick back in
Started the truck

And everything worked. The sync software is obviously pretty buggy.

Jed Clampett

Hey thanks for this helpful post, Daystrom. I hope I never need it, but it's good to have the info, and I appreciate it.

daystrom

No nav and no U3. U3 was discontinued a few years ago.

The drive was scandisked but no errors were found.

Just strange how it worked well for a long time and then all of a sudden chaos, then back to normal after I ran the utility.

Worth a try though even though flash drives don't need defraged.

SwampPieces

I have the BSOD occur once or twice a week and no USB plugged in. Have to restart the truck to get it to function again. For what it's worth..