Digitone freezing

same issue here, finally somehow got it to boot up after a bunch of empty and factory resets and then i got to upgrade the firmware but now i’m back to where i was before because after it being on for a while it would just freeze with a bunch of random letters on the screen

waiting on my support ticket

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Any answers to this yet? Mine is freezing on startup. Tried everything including an OS upgrade from the recovery page. No luck

I wrote to Elektron support, but they are apparently on vacation for the summer (must be nice!), or lighter staff.

When I had the problem, I send it to Thomman, who send it back to me saying there no problem. I send it back, with video, and finaly they send it to Elektron. They change the CPU, and now it work fine.

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Did anyone get theirs working?
Mine just did this, I can get into test mode but cannot boot. I tried upgrading the OS to see if that would help but it got stuck at the end and didn’t work. Both times.

I got a new board from Elektron and installed and it works now, but I lost all my projects, so now I am wondering if there is a way to access the old stored projects on the old board?

when this happened to me recently it froze with the arp still playing and I had to turn it off, when I turned it back on I got stuck at the boot screen. I did a soft reset by pulling the power supply cable out for about a minute and then I was able to boot up again, I’m assuming you tried all that but I would say if you want to get your projects out of the old drive you’ll have to re-install and see if you can get it to boot up.

when you started in test mode did you receive any errors?

Yep, tried all that. Unlugged, left it off. Tried with Syntakt PSU too. Test mode didn’t get any errors. ALL OK.
I tried unplugging and re-plugging the ribbon cables inside, didn’t change anything.

I hate to say it but I think the data is probably lost unless elektron has a way to pull data off the device using those open headers you see on the digitone board.

that’s a bit concerning to hear for me since mine just did that. did you have any indication this was coming, did it ever do it before? or just one day it took a shit? what was the year and build date on your DN unit?

It just happened. I was up late preparing a set and had it on for about 4 hours. Saved project, switched it off as usual and went to bed. Woke up next day and it froze when booting. Never happened before, its about 2.5 years old. Board says 2017, same as the replacement one I got.

No warning, no indication of anything wrong. So, lesson learned to backup on computer all the time. But that’s a pain as I work on it constantly and don’'t always have access to a computer.

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I just tried an empty reset, hoping that I could still recover the projects from the + drive but no luck. It stays frozen on the E logo boot screen. When powering off, the up, down, right arrows glow a dim red colour for a second as well as the Syn2, FLTR, AMP and LFO buttons. Then it powers off.
UI FW is 1.5
OS is 1.32A

I feel like a 4 hour session should not be outside of the scope of reasonable use. I really hope I don’t have to deal with that, my warranty is up later this year. So what, they sent you the board that attaches to the bottom part of the chassis and that resolved the issue?

man I’m not big on backing up to computer either.

this may be a strange question, but when you power on - which of your button led’s light up during the boot sequence? My digitakt, everything lights up pretty much but my digitone only a few buttons light up and I always thought it was strange, but I’ve only ever played with my own machine so I don’t know what the normal behavior is on power up.

It was just out of warranty, so I had to buy a replacement board. It works with the replacement board, but it’s like new fresh out of the box. So I have to start all from scratch again. Sounds, Patterns, Projects. I had 2.5 years worth of Projects on there that I have never backed up. My own fault I guess. I am thinking that maybe a good tech could remove the dram or +drive where ever it sits on the board and put it on the new board. Not sure if that would work though as there may be some address issues? There seems to be no way to access the +drive in test mode, I have tried recuva and easus but no luck without the USB being active and the DN not being able to switch to disk mode. Bummer.

this is good information but not good in the way of it’s setting my mind at ease, it’s making me nervous. For the record, can I ask how much the board cost you so I know whether I should actively pursue this with elektron service while my warranty is still active?

Be nice to get hold of the DN schematics so I could see what those header pins do.

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I am also curious about the header pins. I thought they might have a reader at the workshop that uses them to access the error code logs on unreadable machines or do direct access programming tasks

It wasn’t expensive. I’ll send you a DM with the actual price. But, unfortunately, can’t put a price on 2.5 years worth of work.

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Happend to mine on the day I got it :smiley:

Switched it off and on again but still nothing. Waited a few minutes (as stated here before) and everything works fine ever since.

Same issue. Freeze at the logo screen.
Test mode shows either 0, 1 or 2 errors, hmm.
I completely removed the mainboard, inspected, put back and it worked again for a few hours so I could make a backup and an OS downgrade. Everything worked.
Next day freeze all the time.
I have a backup Digitone fortunately - no loss of work.

Now because of the many same report in this topic I guess it is a common issue probably with the same root cause.

Since you were able to make a backup, try the method of using sysex through transfer via DIN midi to reload the OS upgrade to the current version and see if it clears the errors, it seems to overwrite the data on a deeper level than the USB upgrade.

How to update your device via sysex transfer : Knowledge Base (Beta) (elektron.se)

It will certainly not make things any worse, seems to correct a lot of corrupt data and OS upgrade related issues with the Digi boxes. As long as you have a standard DIN midi interface with your computer it is worth a try.

Thanks, if it works in test mode I will try. Currently, I can reach test mode only.

Anyway, I recognized that despite I did the downgrade from 1.40C to 1.40 the capital letter in the bottom left corner during logo screen hadn’t changed.
It is still ‘H’ and not ‘E’ like with my backup machine also on 1.40.

I will also try removing the mainboard again as it helped earlier.
Maybe as I touched and cleaned I also discharge some capacitance on the board and components.

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