[Help] Sansa Clip v2 bricked, NAND reset OK, what next?

[Darko]

Hi folks, glad you are still here after how long... almost 3 years! Its been that long already?

Actually the H10 is a much less powerful device, although it does have a real screen.

Hi saratoga, yes, deff in the CPU power realm (if I recall, H10 had issues with AAC HE profile songs, but everything else worked great), but according to my ears the sound-quality and max loudness is on the H10 side, sorry to say that. And nice touch scroll, bigger screen, optional line-in for recording (or if you did not had a craddle, you could solder wires directly on the board, they were properly marked-up) made it more serious player in my eyes. But - heavy, too. It just eats battery in comparison to Sansa Clip which playes for 15 hours.

Anyway, those days are now over; touch screens are all over the place, but still... sometimes I get them and listen

@ [Saint]
Hope you were refering to audiomodder1's step 5, since my formating adventure was just a joke.

Cheers to all!

[audiomodder1]

Darko - You are right, I should have looked a little bit more.  Those instructions are for Linux though, and so not very useful to me.  What I posted is for windows users, and will hopefully help some of them.

The reason I would be tempted to avoid it, and write in a *rockbox modified* firmware image, is that in the past I have encountered several devices that were left incapable of booting the original firmware after a "recovery" (I use the quotes, because, well...you get it, I'm sure), and required someone with a working player to do a full dump of the volume, and that to be written to the device, in order to restore the original firmware.

Were these devices Sansa Clips?  I found this step very necessary since the internal SD would not format/ delete /etc even using partitioning software outside of Windows.  The recovery mode format is ultimately what saved the player.

[[Saint]]

I would be tempted to blame that on the choice of operating system and tools used.

dd is happy to write to any volume, as long as it is accessible.

One could use dd for Windows, but it is pretty brain dead and the syntax is nightmarish.


The TL;DR version is basically:

Yes, this worked for you - but I would be wary if I were another user expecting the same outcome. This is by no means an exact science and some who have attempted this have ended up being left incapable of booting the original firmware, unless they are incredibly lucky and can find someone else with the same device who is willing to open it, risk bricking their hardware, and dump an intact system image from a working device.

And you can imagine how difficult that is to acquire. Our community is generally speaking, helpful and supportive, but many of us (and rightly so) aren't going to be willing to risk our own hardware in order to (maybe) recover someone else's.

YMMV, as stated earlier, I don't believe there is any such thing as a "textbook case" of recovery for these devices. I have guided a great many users through recovering their devices, and each time the process has been ever so slightly different, either by fluke or necessity.


[Saint]

[audiomodder1]

Saint, you didn't answer my question: are you talking from experience on Sansa Clip players, or just players in general? 

I suppose it is possible my computer / tools had something to do with it.  I doubt it though.  I was using Windows 7 Disk Manager and EaseUS Partition Manager.  When both of those failed to format or erase the internal SD I think it makes sense to conclude that there was a real problem with it.  I'm just stating what worked for me, and wiping the internal SD in recovery mode with win32dd to reformat it saved the day.  Just trying to document that for other people who are trying to fix their players (at their own risk of course). 

There are many risks involved with this unbricking, yes, but when you have a non-working player in the first place I think the risk is well worth taking.

[audiomodder1]

delete