Episode: 922
Title: HPR0922: Updating a Garmin GPS for free
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0922/hpr0922.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 04:59:23

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Hello everyone, this is Little Box and this is another HPR episode that I'm doing this time
it's on how to update your Garmin GPS to get the newest maps which has of now are the 2012
maps.
I just want to put a little warning out there, I'm not honing this method, I'm just reporting
it, I've read about it on numerous sites and saw the steps and procedures and I thought
that everybody might want to check this out.
I do have some sources, there is some hack labs, www.hacklabs.com slash 2011 slash Garmin's
Dash or hyphen 2012, hyphen map, hyphen upstate, that will describe the procedure.
There is a YouTube video which I will have all these sources in my show notes and then
the torrent file that I recommend is from the Powered Bay and that is also in my show
notes.
It's a long, long address so I don't really want to say it but basically I've been noticing
on the web you know various articles of how to do this for free and the only thing you
really need is a torrent, piece of software that does torrenting, I used a U-torrent like
our Transmission and basically you have to search for Garmin City Navigator 2012.10
and torrent file or you can look for 2012.20 torrent file.
I again have links to both of those on my show notes.
So basically the steps are you connect your device to the computer, it mounts it as
an external drive so you go into the newbie or the Garmin, it will have a blue triangle
icon and take Garmin on it, you go into it and there is a make a backup of a file called
gmapprom.image.img to your computer, just copy it off on your desktop, the ones that
I've seen are about 1.2 gigabytes so it does take a while to copy off and then you want
to delete that gmapprom.img file from the device after you make the backup and I also deleted
any unused language files, there are tons and tons of files on there for different countries,
different languages, you don't need them unless you want them on there, I just kept the
English ones, the American English ones and that freed up some extra space too because
the gmapprom.image that you're putting on your Garmin is actually bigger than the one
that was there so you need to play with some space and free up some space. After you delete
all of your unused files and the gmapprom.image, next just go to your recycle bin and empty it,
that way all the contents are actually off of the device. Once you're done doing that,
copy the new gmapprom.image to the device and if you happen to download it and it's something
named something else, just rename it to gmapprom.img and put it on the device's root menu basically
or under the Garmin menu, sorry, and that does again take about 20 minutes or 20 to 30 minutes
so it's a 1.5 gigabyte file, the ones that I've seen. Once that's done,
say free, eject the device and then it'll restart and you go to your map info by tools,
settings, map and then map info and you should see that you have the 2012.10 or .20 maps on it
and that's it. So there you have it. This has been another HPR, so buy a little box.
If anybody has some time, please contribute to HPR and keep the shows going. All right, thank you.
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