SOLVED! Anyone that's been reading this thread probably thinks I'm a loser with no time on my hands trying to fix this sansa. Well I'm on Thanksgiving break so I have nothing to do haha. Anyway, I realized that the prongs at the bottom of the device (the broken 30-pin connector) were at some points touching, which was causing the device to overheat in Rockbox mode (but not Sansa mode, which I still don't understand).
So I messed around with the prongs a little bit and managed to get it so that it was overheating anymore. This then solved all the other playback problems as well. And I now have another working Sansa with rockbox!
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Okay guys, I'm re-writing this thread so that it is now clearer what my problem is. This thread probably now belongs in the "hardware" section of the forums as well.
What the main issue is the device overheats when using Rockbox. However, it does not overheat using the official sansa firmware. I took apart my Sansa and realized that the chip that gets hot is the chip on the back middle of the board labeled "Nvidia." When I have it apart, the chip gets way too hot to touch (I didn't know chips can get that hot!).
Here are some other software side-affects of this overheating. I cannot playback anything. I hear some feedback on the headphones, but it's just a faint crackling. I can also hear crackling when I move through the menus.
It also reports my battery percentage as going down about 5% each second.
It will also randomly turn off when in USB mode.
Below is the original thread I had posted to this problem, which provides a bit more details about the story of this device.
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Hi guys,
I recently bought another Sansa for my collection, and I'm running into a few problems with it using Rockbox.
I've only messed around with it for a few hours, but I'm experiencing some very weird issues.
First, playback doesn't work. At all. Works fine on original Sansa firmware.
Second, I'm having power issues. I checked the battery percentage in Rockbox, and it said 9%. Left it plugged in for about 45 minutes (should charge quite a bit in that amount of time) and it only said 14% and the device was HOT! Immediately cools down and charges normally when on Sansa firmware...
I'm also experiencing the device randomly rebooting when in usb mode (again, only in RockBox).
I'm using the latest "current build" for the sansa e200v1 series. I followed the guide on the wiki to install the bootloader.
Any advice guys?
A little more testing...booted back into Rockbox mode with the firmware that was on my e250v1 (r28314-101019) and got the same issues. Interestingly, the battery starts at like 57%, then literally each second it drops about 5%. Weird.
More testing...I plugged it in without the battery, and it's definitely the device itself that is heating up. It gets hot without the battery inside. Playback still doesn't work in rockbox either.
Anyone have any ideas???
Let me add a few more details here....I bought 2 of these e250R's broken on eBay. One had a cracked screen, I managed to get rockbox on that blindly (and it's working great, I just can't see anything).
The one that is having this overheating issue had a bad connector on the bottom (the plastic piece was missing and some of the little connectors were bent). So I spent about 5 hours fixing all the connectors on the bottom and I managed to get it to fit into a cable. I decided to just glue the connector to the end so I wouldn't have to worry about the connectors getting smashed again.
I was thinking this modification could be causing the overheating, but again it doesn't overheat in regular mode...which leads me to believe this is fixable by software.