E39 auto gearbox

[The Butcher Boy]

Lads, recently purchased a 00 e39 530d automatic.
left the house this morning and as soon as I took off gearbox light came on and car is stuck in 5th gear. Reverse works too.
Any body had this happen before or any expirence with this problem,
I'd say gearbox is goosed, but don't want to jump the gun just yet if there's a possibility it's something smaller.
Any help would be very much so appreciated, e39 ownership not going so well so far, fuel pump went last week too but these things are to be expected.
Thanks
Barry

[Andy]

Ah feck. Sorry to hear that Barry. When Conor was doing the work on it he said it looked like someone had already done work on it otherwise I would have changed the oil etc. Not sure what is up though, I hope it's something simple. I have a filter kit if you want it.

[JohnH]

That's a pain, hopefully an oil change can sort it. I did that in all the e39s and the e53 I had and it always seemed to help.
The 2002 e39 needed a software update for the gearbox ecu at some stage so that might be worth checking too

[Bayerische]

Sorry to hear that.

Worst case scenario and the gearbox needs replacing. I imagine a good second hand one can be got relatively cheap. Not ideal....but not a disaster either.

[The Butcher Boy]

Thanks for the input lads! I disconnected the battery and let her sit to reset everything. Thankfully all is back to normal after that so will book her in somewhere and get her plugged in and see what's going on. It's a bit of a relief now knowing that the gearbox isn't totally knsckered as said bayerische a second hand box could be got handy enough I'm sure. A rebuild would be 1k plus I'd say. But then you would have a good box for a long time.
I'll update this after diagnosing the problem.

[318is-joe]

Sounds like a valve body shift valve actuator failure. There are three of them, A B & C in the valve body, they should read a resistance of 16ohms at 20C. If the solenoids check out ok, it's the piston actuators that have stuck or are leaking past.