Screen freeze on Lowrance Elite 4 HDI

[Fishin' Magician]

I was getting all set to head out tomorrow to try for some yellows or maybe even the elusive bluefin tuna and wanted to test out the FF just to make sure that it was working. Good thing I did. It went through it's normal start up and then suddenly froze up. None of the buttons worked and it wouldn't power down. So I finally had to disconnect the battery. I tried it a couple of more times, but each time it froze on the opening screen and wouldn't progress any farther.

Anyone had the same problem? How did you fix it (assuming that you did). it's only 6 months old, so I'd hate to think that it's already dust. Right now it's nothing more than an expensive paperweight.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

[Fishin' Magician]

Update.... For anyone who runs into this problem, try this fix. To do a hard restart / reboot of the entire system, press and hold down the "+" and the "-" buttons at the same time and then press the power button and then release it while still holding the "+ and "-" buttons down. Wait until you hear a beep and then release the buttons.

This enabled me to get to the inital setup screen and once I reconfigured everything again, it seems to work fine. Not sure that I'd want to trust it just yet out in the open ocean, so I'll try it out in the bay first to make sure that i's working properly.

Not sure why it did the freeze screen thing in the first place, but at least I know what to do if it does it again.

Hope that this is of some help to others. Apparently this is an issue with the Elite 4, 5 and 7. I found this 'fix' on another website from others who have had similar issues.

Best of luck!

[double p]

this is good info to know, but hopefully i won't need it.

[yak-fishing-socal]

My elite 4 keeps turning off at least once every trip and then restarts itself but not with my presets I then have to power it down restart it myself and all my presets come back...

sent from my thumbs on my G4

[Fishin' Magician]

I don't know if the hard reset will work in your situation, but it might be worth trying it. You may lose all of your presets and then have to do them again, but if you do it once and have everything go back to the factory default settings, it might stop it from powering off.

It also could be a faulty fuse, so you might want to check out the wiring. I had Andy at OEX install my FF, so I was pretty confident that the wiring wasn't the cause of the problems that I was having.

I also put a long charge on my battery to see if maybe a low battery was the culprit, but I took the FF up to OEX yesterday and Andy hooked it up to a brand new battery and it still had the screen freeze thing.

So once I got it back home, I tried the method I described earlier and it suddently all came back from the dead. I was not looking forward to having to send it back to Lowrance....

[captnblood34]

Magic

[Fishin' Magician]

That could also explain it. It went from being just an expensive paperweight to a fully functioning FF. One can only hope that the demons have been exorcised from it.