Strange behavior c200 series player.

[voyager]

The strangest thing happened with my sansa c200 series player.

I have two identical players both refurb units. I installed rockbox and it works without problems for weeks now but today I connected the player using the USB cable, rockbox kicks back to the original firmware and noting. Its starts charging the battery but it’s not connecting to the pc. Sometimes the pc sees a USB device but it’s not recognizing the player.

I did not know if maybe the cable became bad so I booted the player in recovery mode, hold on, rec and start and a 16 MB drive was found, so the cable must be good. Then I copied the original firmware to the drive and rebooted, the player. It writes the original firmware and all worked fine again, the player now connects with the pc again.

So what did happen ?

My other player decided not to load the original firmware anymore. A USB logo came on in rockbox and then noting, normal it starts the original firmware but now I have to boot into the original firmware holding the left button and its oke.

Is it normal that the players have random, strange behavior? I did nothing special to them, did some files got Corrupted?


I must say, I really really love rockbox. When I got my 2 c200 players I hated them because It uses only the mp3 tags not the file names. In made some mp3’s from my lossless collection ape/flac/wav but tagging al the files is not my cup of tea. With Rockbox i can use flac file’s and there is a normal file browser, I’am so happy I ordered a E260 V1. When I found out it was able to play sid and mod files I did not believe it at first but it really did. This is a great piece of software thank you!

[Chronon]

You don't mention which revisions of Rockbox you are using. 

Regarding the first case, it doesn't sound like any fault of Rockbox.  It reboots the unit and the Sandisk firmware fails to properly establish a USB connection.  It does sound like some corruption to the original firmware.

For the second player, does it properly boot into Sandisk firmware if you plug the USB cable in while the player is off?  Did the behavior start suddenly or did it happen after updating your build? 

No, you shouldn't experience random behaviors.

[pixelma]

[...] but today I connected the player using the USB cable, rockbox kicks back to the original firmware and noting. Its starts charging the battery but it’s not connecting to the pc. Sometimes the pc sees a USB device but it’s not recognizing the player.

It sometimes happens to me too that the PC doesn't recognise the USB connection to my c250 but simply replugging it (Sansa firmware still running) helps; or booting into the OF first and only connecting USB when it is up works for me too. One thing that causes this behaviour is an inserted microSD and it seems I'm not the only one who saw this, which is why a hint was added to the SansaFAQ wiki page. I also experience this sometimes when connecting to a laptop with USB1.1 ports, think I already mentioned this in the forums a while ago...

My other player decided not to load the original firmware anymore. A USB logo came on in rockbox and then noting, normal it starts the original firmware but now I have to boot into the original firmware holding the left button and its oke.

This sounds like you were trying to connect to USB while Rockbox was running. Unfortunately there still is a bug with the automatic reboot into the original firmware from a running Rockbox, which only shows sometimes (in some builds/versions for me). Hopefully it will soon be fixed; until then either connecting to USB while the player is off or - as you found - starting the OF manually should work reliably.

If still one of the procedures work for you, I don't think there's something corrupted.