What Is The Difference Between A Command Boot, Cold Boot And Warm Boot On A PDT6846?

By Andrew Jeremy

In the world of bar code terminals and data collection it is important to recognize that you may encounter a time where you need to reboot your bar code terminals. Most people don't know what the difference is between a cold boot and a warm boot; and how each affects their data collection equipment. This article is designed to eliminate some of that confusion and hopefully provide you with the necessary information on how to correctly recover your PDT6846 if it encounters an error from which it cannot recover.

A Command Boot on a PDT6846 is used to enter the bar code terminal into its command mode. The command mode is used mainly for testing and downloading programs onto the terminal. Much like going to the command prompt on your computer (run/cmd), various DOS commands can be entered and executed on the PDT6846.

A Cold Boot sometimes referred to as a cold start) is the start-up of the terminal from a powered down or off state. A cold boot resets RAM and reboots the program entered onto the NVM. Because a cold boot resets RAM it is important to recognize that any applicatons or data that has not been written to non-volatile memory will be lost.

A Warm Boot (sometimes referred to as a warm start) is the resetting of the PDT6846 once it has been powered on and has encountered an error that cannot be recovered. A warm boot will reset the PDT6846 but will retain any data that has been stored in the RAM.