Sansa Clip+ with OFW broken - cannot get to recognize it as an USB device.

[MarceloRedfield]

Hello!

I've got a 4GB Sansa Clip+ which I use Rockbox since day 0. I installed 3.8 and updated it to 3.8.1.
I believe that I forgot it on the last time I used it, since it was dead this morning. I plugged it in so it would charge and left it by itself.

It did, I noticed it was frozen on that Sansa logo (you know, after Sansa morphs into that logo), I shut it down, booted Rockbox and it worked just fine.

I decided to put some more music in it and tried to plug it in on my PC. It would freeze on the same place as I found it when I took it off the USB this morning. I tried removing the micro SD card, shutting it down and booting on the OFW. It would got from Sansa -> Logo -> Refreshing Media... It goest ~10% on the refreshing media then it reboots to Sansa -> Logo -> Refreshing Media... Foreeeever. When I plug it in it freezes on the Logo and when I shut it down at power it on again, it goest to Rockbox, just fine.

I search around and the likely cause is FS corruption (Rockbox bug since I left it to play until the battery died?), so, the only "recovery method" I found was to plug it in while holding the center button, which led to the same result I had while plugging it in normally.

Is it possible to make Rockbox format the root drive? Is there anything I could try before replacing it? I didn't read Rockbox agreement, EULA or anything, does installing it void my warranty? Any idead on what could I do to recover it?

I've got both Windows and Linux machines, doesn't work on any... Linux won't list it under lsusb and Windows does not detect it...

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Thank you!

[saratoga]

http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/SansaAMS#Formatting_a_Player_that_cannot_get_past_the_Database_Refresh_in_the_OF

[MarceloRedfield]

Hey! First of all, thanks for the fast reply.

Yeah, that's exactly my problem.

Well, I've tried, several times, pulling out the USB cable at several different times of the bootup process.. Either it stays frozen at the logo, reboots, sansa, logo (the for an extremely brief moment I can see the ofw main menu) and then refreshing your media or it stays frozen at the logo just like if I kept it plugged in. Anytime I unplug it I cannot bypass that screen!

Is there any unofficial/debug/internal plugin which could help me with that? Would writing one which would 'rm -rf /*' be too difficult? Any other workaround that Rockbox could help me with?

FIY, when I try to boot the OFW and then boot Rockbox, I get a Boot 3.0 screen before the 3.8.1. I've never seen that screen before!

Thank you.

[saratoga]

Is there any unofficial/debug/internal plugin which could help me with that? Would writing one which would 'rm -rf /*' be too difficult? Any other workaround that Rockbox could help me with?

You can delete files through the rockbox UI, or try loading a build with USB support via the SD card. 

[MarceloRedfield]

I wasn't aware there were builds with USB or that you could enable it and compile your on build.

Still, I enabled to view all files, put a usb enabled build in the sd card, moved /.rockbox to /.rockbak, went to /sd/.rockbox, copied it and pasted on /. I thought that was about it.

Rebooted and - Firmware not found! F***, I thought I had dealt the last blow and lost my non USB player which could work just fine...

Still, for some reason, when I plugged it back in, I finally got it to recognize!

mkfs.msdos, downloaded the last firmware, copied it to the root of the player, unplugged it, flashing firmware... Off, on and... Voilá!

Clip+ rose from its grave!

I was just a noob not to backup my rockbox settings, I'll have to spend a few hours to tune it like it was before, but, oh well, I'm glad I did not lose it!

Saratoga, thanks for the help. I owe you a really cold one!

[[Saint]]

I realize it's a bit late, but...

I thought of a reasonably simple potential fix for this using Rockbox without USB connectivity, that although I can't test it, *should* work... (disclaimer, may not actually work )

It occured to me that you could use the Rockbox file browser to copy existing data files around (ie. your media files) on the internal storage until it's full enough to prevent the OFW from doing it's database refresh.

Rockbox can deal fine with a read only FS, but the OFW expects to have a certain amount of free space and when it's deprived of this it can't refresh the database at startup.

I'm tempted to give this a try myself but my Fuze V2 has a damaged LCD screen and is almost impossible to use as a result


[St.]

[bluebrother]

Rockbox can deal fine with a read only FS, but the OFW expects to have a certain amount of free space and when it's deprived of this it can't refresh the database at startup.

That's not completely true. Rockbox wants to write a few files during runtime as well (especially config.cfg and nvram.bin to store it's current state). You will at least get error messages if Rockbox can't write those files, not sure if you can continue using Rockbox and just ignore them or if normal builds treat them as fatal.