Sansa E250: says it's charging when unplugged, charge & poweroff don't work

[caspian]

I had been using rockbox for a while with no problems, but now it isn't working. My main problem is that it won't charge. When my Sansa E250 is plugged in to USB on my computer running Ubuntu 6.06, it will run okay, and indicate 100% charge, but if I unplug it, the charge indication quickly goes down. If I turn it off then on while unplugged, it says the battery is too low and shuts down. I can run the device with the original firmware by starting it while plugged in, or run rockbox by leaving it plugged in until just before I turn it on.

I have disconnected the battery, rerun sansapatcher, erased rockbox and replaced with the current version (r15606-071112) and neither fixed the problem. However, on the current version, there is a "battery: charging" indication in the Rockbox menu. This is there even when the E250 is unplugged and the battery indicator at the top is in the 30% range (it goes to 100% when plugged in)

Other symptoms: holding down the menu button for a few seconds doesn't shut down the player. The same button works to turn on the player, bring up a menu, or switch it off after about 10 seconds.

The player doesn't automatically switch on when plugged into USB. Maybe this is because it thinks it was already charging so doesn't notice being plugged in.

Yesterday before I was having these problems I added some more to the player (leaving about 780 Meg free), moved most of my music out of the MUSIC directory, rebooted it a lot trying to get rockbox's database to show the music outside of /MUSIC, and moved the music back under /MUSIC. This included shutting the device off while it was still booting the original firmware or running refresh database on the original firmware. I also wiggled the USB connector at the computer end making sure it was plugged in. The day before I had run doom without disabling voice menus. I don't know which of that would be most likely to cause the problems. I hadn't upgraded rockbox until I had the charging and poweroff problems. I just tried moving the music out of /MUSIC with the new version of rockbox and it shows up fine in the database now.

After writing most of this post, I tested again with r15607. It still has the problems.

[AutobahnSHO]

Sorry I can't help much-

I would erase rockbox, reload the original firmware. Verify everything works as it should, then maybe reload rockbox.

I would AVOID messing with it while it's updating or refreshing databases. You're only looking for trouble there.

Good luck!