A118 stuck ON, not recording, can't turn off

Gibson99

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TL;DR - camera was stuck ON, not recording, wouldn't turn off till battery died. sd card passed h2testw testing. not sure what's wrong.

So here's a weird one. today my A118 locked up, basically right when it turned on from what i can tell. I was out running errands at lunch, and when i saw an unusual vehicle drive in front of me, i went to press the lock button to save the file. Before I even pressed the button, i noticed that the screen was already on (it should have been off by then since i have it set to 1 minute). i tried clicking the triangle button at least 5 times but never saw the yellow triangle appear, and at that point i noticed that there was no flashing red dot on the screen. BUT - the REC light was flashing, just like it should be while it was recording!

the camera was still working, as the video on screen was live and moving smoothly. since i was at a red light and i knew it would be a long light, i popped my camera off the windshield and tried playing with it. i noticed that the clock at the bottom of the screen was not moving (seconds were stuck but should have been counting). i tried all 5 front buttons, and the only one that did anything was that quickly tapping power would turn the screen on or off. holding power wouldn't turn it off. being unplugged from power also didn't turn it off. even tried removing the SD card, hoping to get an error message, but i got nothing. about then my light turned green, so i set the camera in a cup holder and finished the drive home. the whole time the camera's screen was on, and it stayed on at least another 15 minutes while i ate my lunch and idly fiddled with the camera. about that time i remembered the reset button on the side and tried to press it, but i think that's about when the battery died, since the lights at the top sort of flickered, then everything turned off, and i couldn't get it to turn back on. once i plugged the camera into my pc via usb, i checked everything, and the menu options and time/date were still set correctly, so apparently i did not actually reset it.

then i put the SD card in my laptop. it had good recordings from all my errands till about 5 minutes before i noticed the problem. last file was not corrupt, and when i watched it, it looked like a normal shutdown about 15 seconds after i turned the car off. it didn't have anything from when i left that store and got back on the road, or any of the video with me fiddling with the camera.

i did a quick format on the card to delete the video files from today, then ran a full write/verify in h2testw:
h2testw said:
Warning: Only 15250 of 15251 MByte tested.
Test finished without errors.
You can now delete the test files *.h2w or verify them again.
Writing speed: 14.6 MByte/s
Reading speed: 19.5 MByte/s
H2testw v1.4

i will admit that this is the first time i've used this card in my a118. it's a 16gb Lexar class 10and it came packed in with my Blacksys CF-100, but i never used it in that camera except a few short tests, after which i put a 32gb card in the CF-100. I formatted the 16gb card before using it in my A118, since the Cf100 put a bunch of folders and other stuff on the card that I didn't need. I didn't format the card in the camera, but i didn't change its filesystem either - it's still fat32. and i only did a quick format, which is usually enough.

so now that the h2testw passed, i put the card back in the camera, formatted it again (to get rid of the h2test files), and now have it plugged in, recording while pointed at a clock. so far everything looks normal - flashing red dot on screen and flashing REC light. oh - my firmware is may 23 2014. i've never tried to update the firmware, because "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," right? i don't have the GPS antenna (wasn't available when i bought the camera) and honestly I don't need GPS. i don't think weather was a factor either - it's about 40f outside, and it's gotten close to freezing the last 2 nights but it has not actually frozen. i don't take the camera out of my car - it stays there all the time, and i park in an uncovered driveway so the car is exposed to all elements. plus, it recorded everything today, up till that last trip. i didn't watch every single file to make sure it was good, but the few i did watch looked fine.

think this is a fluke, bad card (even though it tests ok), or a sign that the camera's dying?
 
it's a shutdown error that was in an early firmware version, we fixed this a long time ago, you may not have noticed it at the time but it hung on the previous shutdown, it wasn't actually the startup that failed
 
it's a shutdown error that was in an early firmware version, we fixed this a long time ago, you may not have noticed it at the time but it hung on the previous shutdown, it wasn't actually the startup that failed
oh... so maybe it IS broke, and i SHOULD fix it. maybe it's been doing this a lot and i just never noticed because i don't normally run a bunch of short trips back to back like that. and since the battery eventually dies and sort of "resets" itself while the car was parked, i never noticed since it starts up normally after the battery runs out.

do you know which is the newest firmware i can use on the original hardware? is there an easy way to tell which HW version I have, such as a specific IC used in a certain section of the PCB? or maybe (if we're lucky) a version number silkscreened onto the board?
 
have sent you the details, it should be fine on that version hardware, if you have issues though I'll get you a link to another generic version that will work, I think you'll be fine though
 
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