Can't boot into original firmware

[BillMPL]

I have the e250 and successfully installed Rockbox. Everything was working fine, except I was getting sick of my Sansa not consistently mounting on my Mac when connecting the USB cable.

After some research, I found that downgrading the Sansa firmware to version 1.01.11 will allow the e250 to mount properly every time it's connected. I successfully downgraded, but now Rockbox wouldn't boot anymore.

I reinstalled the Rockbox bootloader and was again able to boot into Rockbox, but now when I attempt to boot into the Sansa firmware, I get and error saying: "can't load from partition bad checksum...etc.".

So now I can boot up into Rockbox, but I can't boot into the original firmware or connect the e250 to my Mac.

I tried booting into recovery mode but the 16mb disk doesn't show up on my Mac. I can see it using DiskUtility, but I can't get it to mount.


Any help would be greatly appreciated.


Thanks,
Bill

-----------------
for some reason I'm not allowed to respond to my own post, I guess, so I have to add further comments in the original post.



So, to follow up:


Good news!
By booting my Mac up in system 9 OS instead of system 10, I was able to get the 16mb recovery mode drive to mount.

Bad News!
Following the instructions from Rockbox Wiki, I tried everything. Loading just the mi4 file and disconnecting, loading the mi4 file and the .rom bootloader file then disconnecting. Loading the mi4 and .rom and a file labeled .fmt then disconnecting. Nothing works.

I can still boot into Rockbox and use the player, but can't get the original firmware installed no matter what I try.

A couple things.
When in recovery mode, there's a locked file that shows up on the 16mb drive called version.txt. Is this normal? When I get info on the 16mb drive, it says there's 11 files using 200k on there. I can only see the one mentioned.

Second thing.
When I boot into recovery mode, the message on my sansa says:
Welcome to Recovery Mode

USB cable connected
Enter USB2.0 MSD mode
LUN0 locked

Is this the normal message I should get, the 'locked' part?



Here's the full error message I get on my sansa when trying to boot into the original firmware:

calculated CRC32: B0000EB6
Can't load from partition
Bad checksum
Trying /system/ OF mi4
Can't load /system/ OF mi4
file not found
trying /system/ OF .bin
Can't load /system/ OF .bin
file not found

then the player shuts down.

Any advice???



--Bill

[Chronon]

There's an outlying case that seems to be cropping up more frequently lately.  You can read the forum post here: http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=18197.0

Unfortunately, the solution is posted on the anythingbutipod forums.  It would be nice to get this info onto our wiki at some point.

The corrupted version.txt and your ability to get into recovery mode (but its inability to restore anything) makes it sound similar to this situation.  Hopefully this can help you.

[BillMPL]

Thank you for this link, I would like to give this a try. My one question, does anyone know if the e260 hidden partition dump file that's provided in the link, work on a e250? If not, does anyone have a hidden partition dump file for a e250?


Thanks,
Bill