Hi and sorry for the multiple posts, just thought I'd keep the chain of events continuous.
To cut a long story short, after installing and deinstalling rockbox, I can only mount the sandisc on my mac when I hold the left button down. Sometimes it won't do it, and I have to resort to aforementioned guerillatactics (recovery mode, disk utility, eject 16MB USB partition that won't show in the finder, restart) to get it going again. I can get into recovery mode on a pc.
So, I can't get the sandisk to start in recovery mode to reset to the original software on my mac. I have read the relevant sections in the wiki, and could not find anything that relates to this problem.
3 Questions:
1) What can I do to make it mount in recovery mode on my mac?
2) how do I find out if I have a European or an American make?
3) would it help if I reinstalled Rockbox?
Thanks again for all answers, MarcGuay, the info about the system restart is already gratefully received!!