Sansa clip + (plus)

[Pampam]

Is the operating system for the Sansa clip plus  version 01.03.23A ( which is a special version for the fed prison sys) stored on the cpu chip or is stored on the 8gb memoery clip?

[saratoga]

Its stored on the NAND flash chip.  Someone dumped a copy of it a while ago, but very little is known about how it works. 

[[Saint]]

it is incredibly difficult to transplant NAND chips without specialist tools.

At the very least you'd want a heat gun, though those aren't particularly well suited to this task and you'd probably end up blowing other little surface mounts off the board if you weren't careful, or a reflow station and those aren't very cheap.

A few years ago I transplanted a NAND from a Nano 2G and it was an absolute nightmare. I have access to the right tools to do it now, and I would still find it difficult. I ended up using a heat gun and and magnifying clamp stand to do it but I had to painstakingly clean up a few accidentally bridged traces with a dremel and a very fine tip afterwards. I don't really recommend it, especially not when the device itself is fairly inexpensive to replace.


[Saint]

[Pampam]

I guess I should have mentioned the symptoms of my player, before posting the last post. The player had a paperclip jammed in the SD slot, which bent the pins and the player puked after that. After the problem was cleared, the player would boot, the flower symbol would come up, then reboot and come up again and then hang on the symbol and stay in that way untill the batt goes dead, or reset via the 15 sec power button method. Any ideas? Very difficult in this situation, I think that all that is needed is to reload the flash and all would probably be good to go. But have no access to the right kind of computer, and the toolz to do so. :-(

One thing I have found is that there is a method to nuke the flash and memory from the player, without having to pull it apart and solder the pins for recovery mode. I'm not sure if it is in the "street players" or not, but on ours, you can hold all the buttons down on the control pad with your thumb, press the home key with the other thumb and hit the power button. The player will boot up(unless it is a hung up player), and ask if you want to erase the firmware. Not sure if that helps anyone, or if that feature is even in the street players.

___________________________________________________
Paste

[Pampam]

Thank you for the reply. Yes a reflow workstation for SMD's would be great, but I don't have access to that here in Club Fed. I really have nothing to lose. Yeah the units are cheap, but when you only make $0.12/hr, and what comes in the mail, you miser when you can. Besides, I'll get to test the skillz, using VERY primitive toolz. No using a Weller here, this is like using 1800's technology. I will let you guys know how it goes, hopefully the brain surgery will be a success. :-) Hope the other 411 posted is helpful to someone on erasing the firmware. L8r