Sansa e250 - Bricked - flash memory issue - PLEASE HELP ME!

[tsmattox]

I have a Sansa e250 and the flash memory seems to be corrupted.  I can tell you how this happened if you want, but here's the problem now:

It will not boot to rockbox (cannot find the rockbox.mi4, etc.).

It will boot to original firmware holding down left button.

When booted to original firmware, it gives a message saying that there is not enough space for music db and to free 6MB.

The device functions as normal (can navigate to all the menus), but the device shows no music is loaded (empty, even though I just loaded almost 2GB of music).

When I try to record a voice memo, it acts like it is recording, but it will not play back the file.  When I reboot, the file is not there (probably was never actually written to flash).

The device can boot in recovery mode, but will not write the mi4 to memory -- it just hangs.

I loaded a sansa.fmt file in the recovery mode and it said it formatted, but it didn't.

When connected in MTP mode, it shows directory structure but no files at all.

When connected in MSC mode, two drives show, but Windows hangs when I click on them.  After a while it comes back and says to insert a disk.

I cannot format the flash "drive" from Windows.

When I use Runtime's GetDataBack software, it reads the memory as if it's a hard drive and I can recover all the data on the disk, but it seems to have an issue with certain sectors (I/O errors).

Using Runtime's DiskExplorer software, it says there are problems reading certain sectors (I can tell you what sectors if you want).  With this software, I can write to the disk and set bytes to x00, but I don't know which ones to set.

I would like to mark these problem sectors as bad, like on hard disks (chkdsk does not recognize the drive), but I don't know how to do this.  Is there a way to do this with flash memory?

Help me if you can -- I would greatly appreciate it!

Thanks,
Tim Mattox

[skaos]

If I remember correctly, the flash memory on these players is on a daughterboard, and there may be some contact problem between daughter- and motherboard. You could try this: open the player, take out the daughterboard and reseat it a few times.

[tsmattox]

This was a very good idea, but I tried it and it didn't work.

Thanks for your help.

Tim

[tsmattox]

I was able to fix this problem by buying a broken e260 (4GB) off ebay (motherboard and battery - no case) and swapping out the memory daughter-board.  It was a 2GB, now it's a 4GB!  The part cost me $3.50 + $4.60 shipping ($8.10).

Thanks for your help!

Tim