Sansa Clip Zip: Stuck on Boot screen, OF stuck on refreshing

[dexeqex]

Hi Everyone,

I've been using Rockbox with my Sansa Clip zip for a few months now.  Not having to look at the Clip Zip's godawful UI has been excellent.  Now I'm afraid I've gone and screwed up my player.  Here's what happened:

1. I had Rockbox to return to previous screen upon restart
2. When exploring the main menu I entered "Playlist Catalog"
3. This crashed my player
4. Upon reboot rockbox tried to return to "playlist catalog" causing a crash again
5. No problem, I'll just boot into the OF and edit the config file
6. Did that, changing the "start in screen" option from "previous" to "menu"
7. Tried to restart rockbox but it stayed forever in the screen with "Boot 4.0" at the bottom
8. Tried to restart into OF but it hangs forever on updating database
9. No luck holding any of the buttons while plugging in USB, the player is never recognized by the PC

So now I'm stuck with a player that really can't do anything at all.  Any help would be most appreciated.

Thank you!

[saratoga]

Sounds like the file system is corrupt.  The bootloader has a failsafe USB mode that shouldn't care about that.  Turn off the player, hold down the select button, then plug in USB.  It should then mount in Windows (the player itself will have a black screen).  Check the disk for errors, fix any that appear.  Probably then everything will work.

[dexeqex]

The player behaves as expected and a removable disk appears in Windows.  However, under properties it's listed as 0 bytes.  Trying to run chkdsk yields the error "Cannot open volume for direct access."  I should also say this is on a Windows Virtual Machine that doesn't have Clip Zip drivers on it.

Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

[saratoga]

Well first I would use a regular PC instead of a virtual machine. 

[dexeqex]

Thanks.  I don't have access to one today.  I'll try tomorrow at work and report back.

[saratoga]

Why can't you use the machine that is hosting the virtual machine?

[dexeqex]

The machine hosting the virtual machine is running XUbuntu.

Here's an update:

I think all the plugging and unplugging had some effect on the file system because I was able to get it to mount in the original firmware.  I should have checked the disk immediately, but of course I didn't.  I followed the uninstall rockbox instructions thinking I could start with a blank slate before re-installing rockbox once everything was stable again.  The firmware update appeared to proceed normally, but it got stuck on "refreshing your media" after reboot.  Plugging in, it got stuck on the flower start up logo and reboots endlessly.  Tried various ways to reset and eventually ended up with a blank screen and no way to connect it to PC.  I fear it's truly dead this time unless there's some kind of recovery mode in the OF I can use.

I tried plugging it in on a Windows 7 machine at work.  It tries to install the driver and fails with an "unable to start device" error.

Thanks for all your help!

[saratoga]

The machine hosting the virtual machine is running XUbuntu.

I would use that rather than a VM which may or may not work.

I think all the plugging and unplugging had some effect on the file system because I was able to get it to mount in the original firmware.  I should have checked the disk immediately, but of course I didn't.  I followed the uninstall rockbox instructions thinking I could start with a blank slate before re-installing rockbox once everything was stable again.

Heh, so the first thing you did was remove the only available recovery mode.  At this point you have to try and fix the OF somehow.  Various people have posted tricks on different sansa players to try and get past the database refresh.  I'd try google and maybe the sandisk forums.  Otherwise, you're out of luck. 

[dexeqex]

Yes, it was an error in judgement.  As it stands the player looks like a brick, but it does appear in fdisk as a 32 MB drive with no partition table.

I appreciate all your help