How to Fix Garmin DAT Files after ‘Saving History’ Failure

MS 150 Day 1 9-11-2010

Every now and then, the fabulous Garmin 705 will get screwed up while “Saving History” when plugging into the computer. What’s good is that the data isn’t lost. What’s bad is that it can take some hacking at the internal structure of the file to fix it up.

I’ve put together a quick script that you can run on the files to fix them up. It’s not perfect (it won’t fix the lap data, for example). But it saves the time to stitch the files together by hand. The script is attached, and the instructions to use it are below.  Be warned – it’s a little geeky.

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Failed External Backup Drive

Damn it. Just when I’m getting ready to backup my PC for that ever-exciting OS upgrade, my external backup hard drive died… a strange death, too. I was deleting an old backup set to make room for the most current and the drive started to hang. Once it finally cancels out, the drive disappears from the computer entirely. Reboot. Plug back in. And then comes the big ‘uh-oh’ … Windows can’t read the drive and wants to format it.

Logical guess: looks like the controller for the external drive has failed. Time to pull it out and stick it in the server.

[edit] Yep… my Adaptec USB 2.0 external enclosure released the last of it’s remaining magic blue smoke. Dropping the drive into my Windows 7 server box rebuilt the drive indexes and recovered the data via chkdsk.