In the past few days, something strange has been happening with my Forerunner 255 Music. One day, with a decent amount of battery left, the watch suddenly turned off. I was only able to restart it by holding one of the buttons for 30 seconds.
After that, the watch started rapidly draining its battery (about 40% in 10 hours) and occasionally shutting down without any low battery warning, which it normally gives. I also noticed that the speaker seemed to have stopped working — it was barely audible behind the vibration. These issues seem unrelated, but at this point, I’m not sure about anything. Sometimes the HR sensor stops working, but I can get it running again by rebooting the watch. And sometimes the watch just freezes, like getting stuck on the stopwatch screen. There are probably more strange behaviors that I’ve forgotten.
Sometimes the unexplainable happens: when switched off, I can see parts of my dial as if the screen had burnt out!
When I try connecting the watch to Garmin Express on my computer, I get a synchronization error with Connect. Oh, and one time, right before another sudden shutdown, I saw the Connect logo with an exclamation mark on the watch screen.
As a result, I decided to completely reset the watch by holding the buttons while it was off, then restored it from a backup. But the chaos continued. After yet another reboot to fix the HR sensor, I was greeted with… the initial setup screen. I had to remove the watch from Garmin Connect and restore it from the backup again.
The watch is currently running software version 20.32. The problems started on the previous version, and I installed the latest one in the middle of these issues.
Unfortunately, there’s no Garmin service center in my country, so I can’t send the watch in for diagnostics.
