Sansa Clip Zip and Windows XP. Drives get letters, but show as empty drives

[kid185]

Hi, I just bought a new 4GB Sansa Clip Zip with Original Firmware 01.01.21, and installed Rockbox 3.13 using the Rockbox Utility. 

Under Windows 7 everything works great.  I can boot to Rockbox or OF and the Internal Memory and the SDCard show up under both with Drive Letters.  I can access both, and read/write to both as one would expect it to work.

The Problem comes when my Daughter, (who is the recipient of the clipzip) plugs it into her computer which uses windows XP.  When booted with Rockbox, two drives show up in windows with drive letters, but as empty drives that I can't write to.  Rockbox Utility can't find the internal memory and comes up with an error message
and asks for me to assign the drive manually.  When I select the drive letter for the Internal memory, I get a message that ich can't write to that location.

If I boot to the Original Firmware, The drives are seen, can be written to, and Rockbox Utilities can locate the drive.

I have checked that the Clip Zip (in the original firmware) is set to MSC and not MTP.

Has anyone else had this problem and does anyone know a solution?

Thanks in advance,

Kid185

[Burrhus]

Hello.

Just to make you know you're not alone : I experience something similar.

I had my Sansa Clip Zip working fine with rockbox (latest release), but after many months of happiness, my player started to behave weirdly when i plugged it to my computer :
- if running the official firmware, I could browse my Clip, and it's sd card, copy, delete, whatever ;
- if off, or if running rockbox, my player froze, with a message I cannot remember of.

Following an advice, I have installed the latest build, but now I experience the same symptoms you describe :
- with official firmware on, everything is OK ;
- when off, or with rockbox on, I see two drives letters showing empty drives. No more freezes, which is a progress.

The problem drove me here today, and thank to you I know I'm not alone suffering this. Then may I say our players are not exactly dysfunctional : it's more like we have found an undocumented feature. :-)

I know I played a lot with the configuration, with the interface... Maybe I did something wrong. I'll make a fresh install, just to see...I'm confident in the developer's tremendous work. rockbox will prevail over this small annoyance.

I'll dig further and report my founds here.

Burrhus.

[bbildman]

Read this thread::

http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php/topic,48571.0.html

[Burrhus]

Well, well, well... Weirdly solved. At least for me.

At the beguiining, I was able to use my sansa clip zip with rockbox, connexing it to my Windows 8 computer.
One day it stopped to work, and I then needed to run official firmware inorder to connect my clip zip to my computer, and browse the clip.

I tried many things to improve the situation, as shown in the thread indicated by the previous message. Change of rockbox version, change of sansa clip zip...

The thing that worked is simply changing my micro USB cable. I suppose my usual cable got somehow deteriorated. Now, the usual one works only with OF, the brand new cable works with rockbox and OF. Let's say OF is more resiliant to cable deterioration..?

Just my two cents...

Burrhus.