Not looking for troubleshooting, Garmin support, Chandin in this case, was great as usual even at 7:00 a.m. CST. I deal with vendor support a lot in my professional roles for the last 30 years. Garmin's has consistently been exceptional compared to the many many tech support teams I've dealt with.
But here's my timeline in case this provides any assistance or insight for anyone else, some of these I'm sure are just random timings but trying to be as fully detailed as possible.
Started a long run on Sunday, got a mile or so into and decided to turn on Event sharing over SMS. You can't do that while you're in an activity so I stopped the run, turned on SMS, hit sync in GCM and watch rebooted.
Watch came back up and a few seconds after the watchface appeared it would reboot. I thought it had a crashed run stuck but I didn't have a way to get to the files to empty the activities folder out so...
Turned off BT on the phone. Watch came back up. Turned off phone connection on watch. Turned on BT on the phone (for headphones).
Paired it with the phone, stayed up, started a run.
About half a mile in, started boot looping.
Turned off BT again, got the watch to not pair. Thought it might be a corrupt fit file so I used the System - Delete activities.
Paired, rebooted. Said a few bad words. Turned off BT again, got it to come back up, left it unpaired.
Started a new run.
Ran 4 hours, no issues.
Stopped the run, tried to pair it to the phone. It paired, synced the run and then the watch rebooted. I know the run was synced because it was visible in GCM now.
But now it's caught in a hard boot loop.
It reboots, shows the Fenix 8 splash screen, changes to Checking Maps, reboots. Over and over.
Go home, it's now sitting on the watch face so I use the menu - system - reset watch, delete user data.
Watch came back up, seemed to be okay, put in my data, paired it to the phone. Still okay.
An hour later it's boot looping at the same Checking Maps point.
Since I couldn't get to the menus, I did the vulcan nerve pinch to master reset it.
Got it back up, didn't bother setting anything, just next next next.
Paired it to the phone. Stayed overnight and part of Monday, then found it boot looping again.
Master reset it again. Left it off pairing, no wifi, nothing. Connected it to Garmin Express, no updates.
Enrolled in the Beta and pushed 15.22 onto it. As soon as it rebooted from the upgrade, it got to the watch face, rebooted.
Back into a boot loop.
Master reset it again. Checked for any updates in GE, nothing.
It stayed up for at least 4 hours but over night it went back into a boot loop which brings us to this morning.
Contacted Garmin, started the conversation with a summary of all the above. He asked for a video of the boot loop which I provided. I understand this completely due to the number of posts I've seen since the F3 about people gaming the system to get new watches for things that were their fault.
I had to master reset it again to get to the secret technician menu to try to grab a RAM dump but it was kind of pointless since it had just been master reset.
By this time he's already arranged for an exchange for me and we're just troubleshooting.
Now I'm waiting for it to crash but not go into a boot loop, which happens but is rare so I can go into the tech menu to try to save a snapshot of the memory for their engineering team.
My feeling based on my professional experience is SOC or memory has developed an issue and is causing some memory corruption. It happens. The more complex a system is, the more things there are that can break it. Yes we have 15 year old servers still in production at my company, we've also had system boards just fry for no reason months after deploying them.
Long story long, just wanted to throw this out there in case anyone else runs into a similar situation.
