F40 gave me "system 000001 error" out of nowhere

[soundtravels]

Hi..I had asked about this at the end of another thread that seemed to have a similar problem as me but it seemed to confuse people a little...so here it is again. please help.

I had installed rockbox and used it well (except that it would crash A LOT) for some months.  The other day I decided to update the rockbox build on my F40 hoping that it would help the crashing problem.  The updating went well.  I continued to use my F40 without problems the rest of that day.
The next day, when I plugged in my player to my laptop with the USB cable, I only got a USB logo. So I pressed the "on" button on the gigabeat and then the gigabeat screen came on, but the bar didn't move.  shortly after I got the system error message (000001).  I tried sliding the battery switch off/on...but I got the same error message.  My computer did not recognize the gigabeat at all (though I heard the ding noise when you connect a USB).  

I have no idea what to do.  Do I have to go into recovery mode by opening up the gigabeat?  I would rather avoid that if at all possible.

Thanks.

[markun]

...My computer did not recognize the gigabeat at all (though I heard the ding noise when you connect a USB).  

It's possible that your computer can't find any partition on your Gigabeat. You could try to recreate the FAT32 partition and format it. If it works you have to put the system files back on your player to get it working again.

There is also a Gigabeat format tool from Toshiba, but I never used it and don't even know where you could get it.

If you can't create a partition, you could try the "hot-swap trick", but it requires opening up your player:

http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/GigabeatFXPort#Gigabeat_Recovery_Procedures

The crashes you get might indicate a more serious hardware problem.

[elborak]

One more (longshot) thing to try... reboot your Windows box. I've had times where windows became confused after repeated connect/disconnect and would no longer recognize the device. Reboot cleared it up.

[soundtravels]

Hi...sorry for the delay in my response.  
I tried "hot-swapp"ing - in fact I am in the middle of it right now!! But my PC does not recognize the GB, so I can't format the hard drive or any of the steps after reconnecting the hard drive to the GB.

Markus - I did not understand what you meant abotu the partition bit. ("try to recreate the FAT32 partition and format it"  How would I do that?  

And Elborak:  what do you mean by reboot Windows box. If you mean just refresh it - that isn't the problem as I have restarted my PC several times already since I first wrote in this forum and my PC does recognize my external hard drive and my flashdrive, as welll as a friend's i Pod with no problems.  

[soundtravels]

UPDATE

I recently installed Gigabeat 3.0 in case I wanted to go back to gigabeat software instead of rockbox and that had the formatting utility in it.  When I tried it, just in case, I would get the message: "A device with a suitable partition is not connected. The program has ended."

This brings me back to the last thing I can try: how would i recreate the suitable partition?