allivant

My father finally decided it was time to look for a replacement for his 01 LS430. It's never needed any major repairs, just regular oil changes and maintenance. He purchased it new after being on the wait list for about a year. It replaced his 90 (I'm pretty sure he got the first year) LS400. That had about 300,000+ miles on it before he sold it. The 430 now has over 450,000 miles on it. I'm sure you all can guess what he's looking at now, ha.

Leaving the car on for the upgrade from 4.1 to 6.1 is fine. It should update as soon as you insert the new disc.

If the disc reads dirty, it either needs buffing out, or it is not OEM and is a bad burn. Bad burns are common on these DL DVDs.

Is the 6.1 disc OEM?

Buffing out? Literally buff it? No I was told it was a good Verbatim DL DVD.

if i install the 6.1, is it possible to go back to 4.1 if it doesn't work for some reason?

Yes, but it is not as automated.

When you put the old disc back in you have to do one of a couple things to get it to reload:

1. Pull the correct fuse for the Nav system for a couple minutes. (in my case, it is Radio1 fuse under the hood)

or if you cannot locate the correct fuse,

2. Remove the positive terminal from your battery for a couple minutes. This has the added "benefit" of resetting all your saved settings :(

Good Luck! Let me know if I can help further.

well i wasn't paying attention when he was doing it but he had the car on, took the old disc out and inserted the new one. were we supposed to do all this while the car was off? it did an update then "disc is dirty" kept flashing. what to do now?

if i install the 6.1, is it possible to go back to 4.1 if it doesn't work for some reason?

is installing this as easy as swapping out the discs? it was on my 03 camry but on my father's LS430 it requred dealer attention after i attempted to do the swap.

I have recently locked up my gen3 navigation system on my 2003 ES300, by hitting the US tab in the secret menu. I have have tried acessing the secret menu again to change this back and now I do not have access to this menu anymore to reset the system. Lexus is telling me that I am screwed and that I have to buy a 2000 dollar system to repair this issue. I refuse to believe that nobody has been able to come up with a fix for this. Lexus has a recovery disk but I am told it will not work for the gen 3 system. If anyone has access to the recovery disk I would like to try it. I believe this is a money thing for Lexus and they will make money by not helping with this. Is they anyone out there that can help me. I am sure that I am not the only one that has this problem.

yes i have a generation 3 recovery cd. i will pm you with info.

can i get the info too? my father's LS430 is not reading the disc now.

well, what did you end up doing les :)?

I had the same issue however, this is what I did and it solved the problem.

Remove the Gen2/3 ECU from your trunk (or wherever it is on your particular model, my 02 LS430's in the trunk).

Carefully remove the faceplate and surrounding screws until you see the circuit board and disk drive.

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO REMOVE THE DISK DRIVE FROM THE CHASSIS.

The key is to drain the ECU battery. You'll see it as a round upright device with yellow edging.

You can use either a small xmas tree bulb (with the wires exposed) or 1 ohm resistor. (I used the xmas light),

and tape one wire to each side of the battery. The light being lit indicates that you've got a good connection.

Don't expect it to be very bright btw but the object is to drain the battery. This could take hours so it's best to

do this before you go to bed.

If you have a volt/ohm meter, you can measure the beginning voltage (3v DC) and what it needs to be be (<2V DC).

Once the voltage is below 2v DC, it can't keep the memory and the o/s will be lost.

Put everything back together and reinstall in car. It will go through a reinstall procedure but when it's done,

you'll be back to the english version.

Note: Even though this will get you back to the default english version. it *cannot* go back to an older version of o/s.

The current version of o/s is stored somewhere else so you MUST have the same version of s/w that you were previously

using in the drive.

Note to self: I spent all last weekend fretting over this. Never, NEVER, EVER mess with those settings again!

-aki

aki, can you tell me more about the ECU in the trunk? is it the silver unit next to the dvd drive?