Ebay Map not working Carminat Renault

[xant14]

I bought for the girlfriend a Europe map for her 2013 Megane. Her car has only UK & Ireland as standard. I went on Tomtom site and saw it for £90 ish. I searched and found one on Ebay, £46. Assumed at that price it would be the real deal and not a snide copy. Didn't realise it was from Lithuania tbh, but hey ho.
It arrived super fast. Put it in the Sat Nav and it did some updating of the system, took about 10 minutes. It now says
'Problem with map
You cannot use this map on this device: Europe-100654'

I have tried putting it thru my computer Tomtom Home, I had previously put the original UK SD card in TTHome, and am logged in to that account associated with the car.
I have been in and out of TTHome and the car hoping it would eventually associate the map with the car, but sadly not yet.

The Ebay map never came with any activating code. At the moment I am not getting any replies from Ebay man.

Any help appreciated, thanks.

 

[dhn]

I would not be surprised if it was a hacked map, if on eBay. Perhaps someone else will provide some guidance for you here.

 

[canderson]

Afraid that you have, as we used to say here, "bought a pig in a poke".

The Carminat units all have their maps (and firmware) stored on SD cards vs. internal flash memory as the case with most other TomTom units. The objective is to permit updating on a PC without ever removing the device from the vehicle. The Carminat unit will have originally come with an SD card that included a map that was keyed to the serial number of the Carminat device as an anti-piracy mechanism. Attempting to install an SD card whose map is not keyed to your device's serial number is going to be a bust.

Whether your eBay seller was aware of this or not, we can't really know, but becoming aware of it, the seller should make good on a return of the card.

 

[xant14]

Ok.. Well for some reason he is sending me another card.
I know before, in the last girlfriends car she only had Scandinavia maps, and her card was not big enough to add Europe maps. I forget exactly how I did it, but basically copied her original card onto a bigger card, bought and downloaded Europe map thru TomTom. Then it was in and out of the car and tomtom home until it eventually worked. I will keep you updated

 

[canderson]

On this generation of TomTom, there is no problem copying a map that is already keyed to the device's serial number to a bigger card as you did. Her original Scandinavia map 'belonged' to the serial number of her unit. So, to, did any maps you purchased specifically for her unit. So your previous experience makes perfect sense. The problem you are running into is that both the original and subsequently downloaded maps come with internal keys that must match the serial number of the device for which they were intended, but that any map from a 3rd party won't match your unit serial number.

There were at one time maps sold by TomTom preloaded on SD cards. That would be a different story, but those maps cannot be copied to another SD card. They were keyed to the serial number of the SD card, again, in an attempt at copy protection.