Sansa e250v1 Blue Ring of Death

[Jerrymc777]

So I literally screwed up my Sansa e250v1 by letting Win10 format the "G:" drive. Everytime I plugged my Sansa into my laptop Win10 kept nagging me that "Drive G: is inaccessible and needs to be formatted"  I kept ignoring this msg until my player started having playback "hiccups" while playing my music. So I finally tried a CheckDisk in Win10 and allowed Win10 to format the pesky "G:" drive. GRRRRRR!!!

Needless to say, now I have a Blue Ring nightlight with NO display at all and a "Tango Digital Media Platform" device in Win10 device manager, and NO 16MB drive at all.

I've tried:

1. Boot into Recovery mode  (black screen;blue ring)
2. Diagnosis Mode  (black screen;blue ring)
3. Manufacturing Mode (black screen;blue ring)
4. One-Click UnBrick with Viewtools (black screen;blue ring;Never finds the 16MB partition)

I'm at the end of the rope thinking this thing is literally Bricked!

Has anyone ever encountered and Fixed this issue?
I LOVE my little $25 REFURB e250v1 Sansa/Rockbox music player, and use it to BLAST my playlists throughout the house!!!

[saratoga]

Yes it's fixable. Use manufacturing mode:

https://www.rockbox.org/wiki/SansaE200Unbrick

I don't think you can actually break the device by formatting, although fixing it is very hard.

[Jerrymc777]

Thanks for the reply.

I've DLd the files from Daniel's site but am unsure how to load the libusb/Tango driver in Ubuntu Linux...?
  I have an Ubuntu server but can also boot into a Debian CD...

Thank you

[saratoga]

Probably:
sudo apt-get install libusb

[Jerrymc777]

Well, I've managed to get the Sansa Firmware loaded!

BUT, now I have 2 WIN10 drives (F: and G:) that are unformatted and RockBox cannot write to them yet.

I'm afraid to format them in WIN10, since that is what F$%$%$ up my device in the first place!

Should I format the 2 drives and if so, which file format? FAT32, FAT16, NTFS, EXT2....?

Thanks!!!

[saratoga]

Should I format the 2 drives

I don't know, you haven't told me what you did. 

[Jerrymc777]

1.  I went into Manufacturing Mode on a Linux system.
2.  Used Daniel's e200tool:
./e200tool recover  BL_SD_boardSupportSD.rom
3.  Finally got into Recovery Mode. (16MB drive opens in Linux)
4.  Copied 01.00.12A firmware (PP5022.mi4) AND created an empty file "sansa.fmt."
5. Rebooted device
6. Sansa firmware now loads but "Fails to load database."
7. WIN10 now sees the device as a Sansa Media Player and shows 2 drives.
(F: and G:)  Both of which are inaccessible (Cannot format them or do anything with them.
8. RockBox Util. fails.  (Cannot mount to F: drive)

This is where I'm stuck at....

[saratoga]

Did you also copy the ROM file? 

The sansa.fmt file reformats the player, so you do not have to format anything if you did that.

[Jerrymc777]

Sorry.

I copied PP5022.mi4
BL_SD_boardSupportSD.rom
and created an empty sansa.fmt file.
 
Rebooted and now I have it working. 

I loaded RB via RB Utility.

I hate the fact that WIN10 keeps wanting to format that F%#% G: drive and keeps complaining it's "inaccessible."
If I knew how to shut OFF WIN10 autoplay, I would have done it years ago!
Any ideas, so I don't inadvertently format it again and screw my E250 up again?

Thanks for the help!

[Jerrymc777]

Of all the posts I've found and gathered on how to repair an E250v1 Blue Ring of Death issue, I think the real issue that confused me was getting some basic simple instructions AND downloading the correct files for the device.

If anyone's interested on a straight forward solution, just PM me...

[Jerrymc777]

Since I cannot insert html code here, I've attached a PDF file with the instructions...

[saratoga]

Why not edit the wiki if there's a problem with it?

[Jerrymc777]

Because Wiki page will not allow new registrations...   

[saratoga]

The wikipage should allow new registrations.  Did you have problems registering an account?

[Jerrymc777]

Yes...see attached