Map Transfer issues with eTrex Legend

I know it's (very) old, but I'd like to try to get my eTrex Legend working as a backup GPS on an upcoming trip.

I'm having problems loading Topo Maps from the old Topo Canada CDs on my Garmin eTrex Legend (the blue one with the monochrome display.) I'm using a USB to Serial converter cable, and the computer sees the device and both devices acknowledge the transfer, but after transferring the map regiions (and I've tried this with Basecamp & Mapsource), the eTrex Legend says "no map" and there's nothing loaded. Waypoints, tracks routes, etc... *do* transfer, so that seems like it would rule out any connection issues. So I'm stumped as to why the maps aren't showing up. Any ideas would be appreciated!

0 Eyelet99 over 1 year ago

How big is the topo map you are trying to transfer? The eTrex Legend specification on the GPSrChive site https://www.gpsrchive.com/eTrex/eTrex%20Legend/index.htm suggests that your device is only provided with 8Mb of internal memory. Might be worth trying a very small area of map to see if it works in principal?

0 JoelCorelitz over 1 year ago in reply to Eyelet99

Thanks - good idea. The combined regions were about 6mb, so under 8, but I tried transferring 1 region (~200k) and am having the same issue, so I'm thinking maybe the part of the flash memory it devotes to map data has gone bad? Only thing i can think of.

0 Eyelet99 over 1 year ago in reply to JoelCorelitz

Might be worth running JaVaWa Device Manager https://www.javawa.nl/jdm_en.html to see if can read the free space (and see what is currently in the internal memory)? If no one else chimes in here, it might be worth cross posting your device issue on the GPSrChive Discussion Forum as the webmaster is very knowledgeable.

Also have a read through the relevant posts on the Geocaching Forum as there are various suggestions made there that might fix this.

0 JaVaWa over 1 year ago

JaVaWa Device Manager cannot access the eTrex Legend, it wasn't made for those very old devices.

Most Garmin maps have to be unlocked for a certain device, they won't work on other Garmins. Newer devices will show a warning when the map is not unlocked, I'm not sure about the really old ones. After the warning it just ignores the map and won't show it in the map menu.

0 JoelCorelitz over 1 year ago in reply to JaVaWa

interesting - that could be the issue, although I don't remember having to unlock these maps - they're the old ones on CD (not SD card like the newer ones.)

0 RichRomano 11 months ago

For me the webupdater messed up firmware and I had no maps. I found another way of updating the firmware here:
TRAMsoft - GARMIN eTrex Legend Firmware Upgrades (English)

I changed the original 0411 to a bak extension and change the 0179 to start with 0411. Then run the updater. After this update the maps will work again but the GPS wouldn't find the satellites. I swapped the names the other way and got the original 0411 to load and after that everything worked.

First swap (real 0411 is named bak and the 0179 is named 0411)

Second swap (real 0179 is named bak and the 0411 is named 0179)