My navigation works perfect sometimes and other times it says (unformated). I have been to the dealer but the service manager in my area doesnt like to help people? So I was wondering if anyone could be of any help? Thank you!

 

Your hard drive is failing, I bet you notice the problem more in hot weather.
First off, your dealer is retarded, consider going to a new one.
Second, don't pay for a dealer to fix this, they'll want at least $400 to fix it (I'm guessing) - it used to cost over $1,000. Anyway, here's how to fix it:

One option is to get another hard drive off of ebay, search for "PCMCIA hard drive" and find one that's at least 520MB. You'll want a PCMCIA Type III hard drive, although I think almost all you'll find will be that type. Now just copy your current hard drive to the new one and you should be set. In order to do this you'll need a laptop with 2 PCMCIA slots stacked on top of each other (to fit the hard drive in), or else just google for PCMCIA type III adapter, and do it from your PC.

Also, I've heard of people having issues with the hard drive if they format it from win XP, try to do it from an older version of windows.

Your other option is to buy a compact flash card, a PCMCIA - CF adapter, and a CF reader/writer for your PC, then copy the data from your current hard drive onto the CF card. Then plug this into the adapter, plug it into your nav system, and now you have solid state memory for your nav system - no moving parts, less chance of failure.

For more information check out http://www.angelfire.com/ga4/99_acura_tl_navi/ for some guy's web page about the nav system (he also sells map data), or search the audio and electronics forum for "hacking navi" for a thread about this a while ago.

just doing my part to keep money from going to the acura dealers, damn I hate them...

 

yeah the same thing happened in my '99...it worked sometimes and other a yellow screen came on...it worked about 1nce every 10times i turned the car on...
Anyways, i took it to the dealership at 55kmi (5 after warranty was over, i got extension at 59kmi) and the dud replaced the hard drive AND the black console in the back... try taking it to another dealership.

 

Hey, thank you for information. Very interesting.. It helped out a lot....

 

Baldwin,
I had the same problem you did. i bought a CompactFlash card from paulemooney based on the information from his site and my Navi works great... It will be the cheapest way to restore your navigation system.
I too have a 99TL with a harddrive Navigation System.

 

Hey etxxz,
The reason your dradrive failed is because it got over heated. You were lucky enough to have had your warranty intact. But if i were you i wuld invest a lil bit of money on a compactflash drive. Not only does it load the Navigaion program faster it also interacts with the user faster as well.