If your Windows Mobile device gets stuck on the splash screen after a soft reset
you might have to perform a hard reset to get the device working properly again. Last weekend my IPAQ Voice Messenger froze up on the splash screen after I synced it to MyPhone. The device was frozen on the splash screen and would not turn off, take a charge or reboot beyond the splash screen. After a couple of hours I finally performed a hard reset and then spent a few more hours reinstalling software, setting up user settings and getting the device back to working order.
Then a couple of days later, the Voice Messenger hung up again on the splash screen after a failed ActiveSync session. I thought it could not be a coincidence that the device got stuck again after syncing PIM data to it.
Hard reset Averted!
I didn’t want to perform another full reset of the device. I decided to explore a hunch I had about the problem, so I plugged the device up to my computer. Even though ActiveSync didn’t recognize the existing partnership, it still connected to the Voice Messenger in guest mode.
I used ActiveSync’s Explore option to browse the Voice Messenger. I navigated to the pim.vol file, which is found in main memory off the root directory, and renamed the file to pimbak.vol. Then I disconnected the Voice Messenger from my computer, performed a soft reset and this time the Voice Messenger booted up to the Start screen. Then I deleted the existing ActiveSync partnership between my computer and the Voice Messenger, set up a new partnership and synced my data to the Voice Messenger.
That's a good catch. I never want to (cross my fingers) have to reset mine, I have so much loaded on it. So, it was a corrupted partnership?
I believe the problem was caused by a corrupted PIM.vol file. The PIM.vol file includes all the contact, calendar, and task data that is on a windows mobile device. During a soft reset, during the bootup cycle, the shortcuts that are in the \windows\startup folder are executed. There's usually an Outlook shortcut in that folder that gets outlook running on the device to make retrieval of this data faster. Since my Voice Messenger had a bad sync of this data right before it got hung up (during the boot cycle), I figured that there was something wrong with the Outlook database (Pim.vol) that was causing the problem. Renaming the pim.vol file essentially flushed out the database by causing the device to recreate a clean, empty file. Since the database on the Voice Messenger was now empty, I thought ActiveSync might "think" I had purposely deleted this data and delete the data from my computer when I synced the two, so I deleted the ActiveSync partnership to avoid possible data loss on my computer.