The Pidion BM170 has become quite a popular little Semi Rugged PDA and we get a lot of requests on how to do all kinds of things with it, this blog looks at how to power down, soft reset and hard reset the device.
Power Down
Older BM170′s operated in a very ”Rugged PDA” manner, the power button only put the device into unattended (hibernate) mode. This is a very low power state so don’t worry too much but on newer devices Pidion have changed the behaviour of the power button so you can now hibernate and power the device completely down on a longer press of the power button.
Soft Reset
Easy peasy, there’s a little recessed reset button on the right hand side of the device as you look at it. You do need something quite slim to operate this, and the bundled Pidion Bm170 stylus is designed to allow you to press the reset button. This soft resets the BM170.
Hard Reset
This is a bit trickier and sometimes needs a couple of attempts before you get the knack. All you do however is hold down the round OK button. Now keep that button held down and now press the soft reset button as in the Soft reset instructions above. Don;t let go of the OK button, keep this held down for 5-10 seconds after you have pressed the soft reset button.
You’ll know if this worked because the device will go into its set-up mode. If not it will just boot back into windows Mobile.
Hard Reset and Clean
A hard reset will not necessarily clean the Pidion BM170 down to factory settings. If you have been using the persistent directories on the device then you also need to make sure that these are set-up prior to a hard reset. The directory you need to look at is called “PidionStore”, it’s right in the top-level root of the BM170′s directory structure and you can go right in there with file explorer. This directory is where you can put all your setup and hard reset resilient applications but of course if you want to clean down the device then you have to sort these out too.
There are 2 ways round this.
Option 1 - What we would recommend is that you either take a copy of your PidionStore folder when you buy your device and keep it safe, or come and ask us here for help. If you get the wrong files in this folder it can cause the device to become unstable.
Option 2 - Put the device into the ULDR menu and format the PidionStore folder back to its original state. I’ll cover this in a later blog this week where we explore the ULDR menu of the Pidion Devices.
