Temporarily bricked my Sansa e280. Help needed please.

[Sweet Spot]

I say temporarily because I doubt this can not be fixed. Anyway, been a very long time since I've posted here, maybe because I've been solely using my Sansa Fuze for the past couple of years, letting my iRiver DAP's and even the refurb Sansa e280 sit in a box. But I've left my Fuze back in Budapest and am now in NY. Long story short, I installed RB on the e280 back when it first came out and wasn't perfectly stable.

I checked to see if there was any progress and of course much has been made so I decided to update the e280 yesterday. I downloaded the automated installer and:

I'm running it off my Intel MacBook Pro (late 2008) 10.6.4  I couldn't remember or tell if my Sansa was V1 or V2 but figured the former since I bought it almost 2 years ago. I chose for the installer to do a full install with both a fresh boot loader and firmware. I also hit "auto detect" for the version number, and it did land on V1, so figured it was a safe bet.

It was almost done, when I got a message saying that it could not continue because the target location was wrong.  ??  I hit continue by accident, and once again likely the wrong choice on the next prompt as well.. and then decided to hit abort when I realized the mistake. Since I hit abort in the middle of it all, I thought ok.. just start over. Unfortunately, it then said that the Sansa no longer had a boot loader installed and that I should fetch one, install it and try again.

But now the bigger problem: When I plug the Sansa in via USB, all that ever happens is a constant/perpetual re-boot.  I figured out how to start it in recovery mode, and after plugging it in to the USB port again, I get this:

"USB cable connected
Enter usb2.0 MSD mode
LUN0 locked"

I've tried to follow links for what to download and such, but most things I've found are related to doing this with Linux or Windows. I don't have my Linux box anymore, and now I'm utterly lost. Would someone please be kind enough to walk me through the steps ?  I'd hate to just toss the Sansa in the garbage. Btw... it actually boots just fine and I can see the file system. I've even cleared everything as well. If it's just a case of a corrupted boot loader, is this easy enough to fix ?

Doug

[gevaerts]

Your sansa is in recovery mode. See http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/SansaE200Unbrick for details.

As a reminder, if you don't fully understand some steps, ask. Doing the wrong thing in this sort of case can be somewhat dangerous.

[Sweet Spot]

I hadn't thought of this before, but perhaps a better idea: I just realized that I could boot my e280 with the regular Sansa firmware, so I did. From here, I suppose it would be a lot easier to simply install a release manually. Would you agree with this ?

doug

Edit:  Thinking about it again, I wanted to see if the automated installer would work with the sansa booted in the original firmware, but received a message :



I've followed links which seem utterly endless and can't find this file. Help ?

[gevaerts]

Ah, right. I didn't read your first post properly apparently.

Yes, your sansa is fine, don't mess with recovery mode. This might be an issue with Rockbox Utilit. Manual install should work fine.

[Sweet Spot]

Please see my post above as I've edited it. I may not necessarily "need"the original FW file, but I sure would like things to be back in proper order. Can you please guide me to this missing file ?

Doug

Edit (again) I believe that the original FW file resides in the e280 pdf manual, as does the bootloader and the version of mkamsboot for OS X.

[gevaerts]

That's... interesting. You definitely have an e200v1 (the recovery mode proves that), but that dialog is for the v2. On the v1, the installer shoudln't need anything extra. I'll try to point people who know more to this thread.

[Sweet Spot]

Confirmed Version 1 via regular firmware settings menu. So the mistake was mine the first time, as I attempted to install the firmware with the automated installer using the version 2 dialog. 

Doug

[bluebrother]

I can't reproduce this issue. If I select the e200v1 as target it installs without asking for a firmware file, while the dialog you've posted shows up if I select an e200v2 so the behaviour is completely as expected. I'm not completely sure: did you figure that you've selected the wrong player? Or is there still an issue? If there's still an issue please post the output of the Help / Troubleshoot / System Trace dialog.

[funman]

Just guessing: did you not use automatic detection and manually selected the e200v2 instead?