How To: Restore a Seriously Ill Pre

With users finding so many ways to tweak their Palm Pre's, some wonder if they might "Brick" their Pre (make it stop working). The good news is that you basically can't brick a Pre and if it seems 'bricked,' there are lots of ways to restore it. In extreme cases, which translates to 'hardware failure,' you can brick your Pre, but we're going to assume you know what to do when that happens (get a replacement).

So you've managed to get your Pre in dire straits. We're going to walk you through the steps you should take to try to save it.

After the break, we will detail how to do a quick Restart, Partial Erase, and Full Erase. Then we'll detail how to use the webOS Repair Utility, webOS Doctor, and what to do if even the palm.com website instructions don't work. If you know the tricks, you can save your data too.

One quick note: Since that webOS 1.2.1 update just came out, you may need to wait a bit for some of the tools we're going to discuss to be fully updated to work. At the moment, webOS Doctor and WebOS Repair Utility are not compatible with 1.2.1. When that changes, we'll update this article.

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