Sansa 280v2; formats to only 512MB?? Help!

[Serenity]

Hi all, I'm assuming I did something stupid, because the Sansa couldn't have messed itself up this badly.  Long story:

Got a secondhand e280v2 to Rockbox.  When I got it, it wasn't booting--it would turn on, give me the Sandisk screen, then turn off.  I updated the firmware, which seemed to work.

Then I used the Rockbox utility (with the firmware file I used to update the Sansa) to install the bootloader only.  After it was done, I unzipped Rockbox 3.5 onto it and unmounted (all in Windows Vista).  It gave me the "Updating Firmware" screen, then turned off.  And I was right back to the freezing on the Sansa splash screen--it wouldn't boot farther than that.

I managed to get it to connect on the Vista machine after much trying and waiting, dragged the original e200.bin file onto the Sansa and unmounted.  We did the "Updating Firmware" dialogue on the player again....for about half an hour, before I finally turned it off.

SO.  I followed the unbrick directions on AnythingButIpod (short it while plugging in the USB cable, use Ubuntu's terminal & dump a known working firmware image into flash).  I had done it before on a different v2 with success.  This time, the Sansa went dead.  Wouldn't even turn on.

I let it sit a week with no battery, but I put the battery back in, tried it out and it connects & mounts just fine--but it thinks it has a capacity of 512MB, not 8GB.  It boots into the OF, and I tried formatting it through the OF's format option, but it stays at 512MB.

What did I do wrong, and how can I fix it?  I'm sure I did something stupid in Ubuntu, since I'm completely unfamiliar with it.  My current theory--when dumping the "good" firmware file into flash, I mistook the 8GB of internal storage for whatever flash the machine has reserved for its firmware.  Sorry for the long post and lack of any informative Terminal screens--I didn't save any.

[saratoga]

You couldn't have hit the internal OS space on the NAND, its not exposed over USB.

Other then that I have no idea.  You should just be able to reformat it to an 8GB disk.

[j8048188]

##Disclaimer:  I'm not sure how this will work, or if it may brick your player, but I think it is worth a try##
##This is just a suggestion!##
When you plug it into a windows computer (in MSC,) Can you do a repartition in Disk Management? (delete 512mb partition, Create new partition with all available space?)
You may need to re-flash the OF to the player after.

[Serenity]

Hm.  Disk Management doesn't allow me to delete the partition--the option is greyed out.  I was going to use my old standby GParted, but my Linux machine is being strange today...

Thanks for the idea, though, j8048188--I'll repartition its memoryas soon as I can and see what happens.

Oh, other detail--for some reason, it shows up under Ubuntu as "Sandisk e260", where the other v2 I resurrected showed up as a "Sandisk e200p".  Same firmware download for both.  I wonder if whomever owned this e280 before I did may have done a little hardware swapping.

[yapper]

I was going to use my old standby GParted, but my Linux machine is being strange today

Try the LiveCD (or Live USB) version of Gparted

[Serenity]

Okay...I've done some more fiddling, and I have a theory.

To resurrect this one, I had to dump an image of the OF into its flash. I may have given Ubuntu the wrong disc (the 8GB of storage) on which to dump its firmware image.

Is there a way to fix this at all?