Guys,

I am a JSLO fan. I had the same damn re-booting problem. Contacted jslo, he was very responsive and offered to take a look at it for me. I mailed him my PCM, he was very communicative on the process and employed the fix in no time. He shipped my unit back to me which I installed and it has been working flawlessly since that time.

Big shout out to jslo, a true gentleman and a valuable member of this community.

If you have a good, new hard drive in there now, the update should fix it

Well, the installed SSD was a factory new one. The cloned content was from the old HDD.
I will order the update DVD and hopefully things are going to be fixed.

If not, is there any other option?
Like "jhj" mentioned you helped him with his unit; I'm from Germany so I dont know if you will be able to help me at all :-)

I know a guy who has a PCM3.1 in his 981 Boxter -> would it be an option if he clones his HDD and I istall his copy? Not sure because of 981 and not 911..

Again thanks for your help and please do excuse my bad English - it has been a while since school

Hi guys, wll I was actually posting a reply but it doesnt show up...
@jslo perhaps you could please send me a private message I can reply on? Dont know how this works...Thanks

@jslo where are you getting the update disc from? Sometimes in the summer mine reboots. Happens maybe 5 times a year.. more every year..

I have made copies and can send you one. I'm charging $25 shipped. It may fix the issue temporarily, but it does sound like your hard drive may be on the way out. It might be best to get it backed up before it fails for good. That is what happened to mine.

are you still doing the service? I can ship one to you from Amazon and send you mine.

I have SSDs on-hand and can definitely get you backed up. If your drive still works, I can just clone the drive itself, which would save you on shipping and the worry of sending the whole unit. I'd include an update disc as well when I send it back, just in case it's needed when you re-install the drive. I recently did my new-to-me Cayman as soon as I picked it up and didn't need to to the update. Just dropped the drive back in place, and powered up the unit. I typically pull the fuse before I muck about with the head unit just be safe. The hard drive can be removed without actually disconnecting the entire head unit as well. Just need to pull it far enough out to access the two screws on the top of the unit.

I'd charge you like $80 to just do the drive, which would include the cost of the new ssd, my time to clone your drive, and the update disc. You can ship it to me and include a return label. We could do $40 up front and another $40 when I ship it back to you.

It's way cheaper than a replacement unit. I was looking on ebay the other day and they are over $6k. I think they are at least $4600 from Porsche if they can actually get them.

The unit works fine all the time except for a few days in the summer when it's around a 100ﾟ... I'm pretty familiar with the innards of the pcm and 3.1 I recently installed a few car play units.. I also probably don't need the update disc thecurrent system is 2.47.. so 55$?

Hi jslo,

I sent you a message, not sure it went through. PM me - definitely interested in getting
a clone SSD. I have exact same problem here - fails update at around 95-98% and in
trying to close, looks like HDD is not readable.

Thanks!

I finally updated my working HDD to a SSD. I used the Kingston A400 120GB SSD and did a disk to disk copy using Clonezilla copied to a bootable DVD.

I initially tried to create an image to my local desktop and then copy the image to the SSD but there was an error while the image was being transferred (I suspect a bad sector in my laptop - lol!). The SSD worked fine but navigation would not load. So I re-imaged the SSD using the clonezilla disk to disk copy option selecting the relevant option for dd sector to sector and it went through fine. I now have it all working including the jukebox and navigation.

Thanks Jslo for sharing the information about Clonezilla - its was totally free! .. I now have a working original HDD as backup as well.

On a side note, while HDD issues may be a partial cause of the problem i suspect filesystem corruption to be a cause as well. The issues I faced with the PCM upgrade failing midway (I got the blue screen of death and i had to remake ('format') the partition made me think there were bad blocks in the HDD but the current disk to disk copy using Clonezilla did not flag any bad blocks, so I now am pretty sure about partition corruption. So I would recommend that anyone attempting this take an extra backup or copy of the HDD or SSD. SSDs are more reliable but if the filesystem causes corruption, then you may still end up with problems in a year or two and its good to have a backup copy.

Hi JSLO,

Definitely interested in a pre-cloned SSD. My HDD is dead I think. Clonezilla gives a bunch of "Buffer I/O error" on that drive during Clonezilla boot-up on USB, then finally gets Clonezilla menus, but hangs up after disk to disk screen saying "excluding busy partition or disk" then just hangs there. I have an update disk. PM me back. Sent you a separate message but new here so not sure it went thru - sorry for perhaps a 2nd message.

Thanks!

did you have jukebox before?

For me, not really sure as did not use it. I can say its a 2016 with Nav & Park Assist head unit mfg date of Oct 2015. So I think the answer would be yes. Any insights either way? I hear it may be expensive to get the VIN resync after a new or clone HD installed - but now I stuck with the emergency screen, so options are limited. Kari offered great advice and perhaps jslo can sell me a clone. Anyone have any idea on cost for dealer to do the VIN sync (I guess via PWIS) to at least quantify the cost?

Any insights either way on having or not having jukebox relative to my situation?

The PCM system unlike a regular PC does not boot from HDD. All of the essential software is within the PCM3.1 internal flash memory. What the HDD has is a bunch of apps like a custom browser and utilities, some temporary space for data processing and log files, the map files and the jukebox media (songs/audio files). If you have the PCM3.1 update disk and the time, just search for a folder called HDD and a subfolder called mnt - browse through it - that is what gets loaded to the main partitions in the HDD - so any functionality provided by those utilities is affected based on the part of the HDD that fails. In addition to that you could lose the maps (your screen will show no maps or will be stuck with something like 'loading maps' as I did when my initial cloning attempt had an error) and also lose any songs/media you have in the jukebox. If you have a complete disk failure all of the above will be affected.

One of the main problems folks are trying to solve with a replacement HDD/SSD is when the PCM restarts every few minutes and I suspect this has something do with the partition on the disk involved with logging system parameters and errors (Not 100% certain of this but I have seen scenarios in other IT systems like databases where things start to fail when the system log partitions have no space left in them for new logs - in this case a failed HDD partition or filesystem corruption could cause this as the system is not able to write to log files...)

I havent dealt with complete HDD failure but I think you will get all of the functionality you had back once you are able to successfully run the update disk with a replacement HDD/SSD without dealer involvement except for Navigation/maps. I have no idea if maps are VIN locked but even if it is not, your map license stored in the flash memory is only for a given version of maps. So unless you get a cloned SSD with the same version of maps as you originally had, any attempt is futile

From my point of view, your options are:
- Best bet: Clone your failing HDD - Clonezilla takes a while but just hang in there. If disk to disk does not work, then try partition to image option for the first 3 partitions which are the main ones.. .. ...or maybe you can use other software (some work some dont.. check posts on the net) or ship the disk to someone to recover..
- Alternate: Get a clone of another disk - even if navigation does not work as i mentioned above, you will likely get the rest of the functionality
- Last option: If you do have a HDD/SSD to spare and know how to use fdisk (its available within Clonezilla ) PM me, and i can share the partition sectors with you and you can attempt to build a new disk with identical partitions. YOu can then try to run the update disk and see if that helps you get back the rest of the functionality but navigation will definitely not work with this option unless you are able to get a good clone of the correct partition from your existing disk as in the first point..

Now there is nothing stopping you from trying one of the above options and switching to another ...
good luck!