e200 v2 USB: device descriptor read/64, error -110

[tcrass]

Hi there,

I recently acquired two used SANSA e200 players as spare devices -- just in case the one I've been using for many years should cease working one day... I of course immediately installed rockbox (3.14) on both new players.

However, with either of them, I've got no luck transferring a reasonable amount of audio files onto the players' (internal) memory. In like 95% of my attempts, transfer stops after a few dozen seconds and the players freeze. When this happens, journalctl says

kernel: usb 2-1: reset high-speed USB device number 34 using xhci_hcd
kernel: usb 2-1: device descriptor read/64, error -110

I read somewhere that the USB error code -110 indicates that a device drew too much power.

This only happens with rockbox; USB transfer works flawlessly with the original firmware. (I also tried downgrading rockbox to 3.13, but this didn't prevent the error from happening.)

It turned out that the my two new players are e200 v2 devices; my old SANSA (wich doesn't exhibit any USB problems whatsoever) is a v1, though.

So... anybody having similar problems? Or maybe even a solution...?

Cheers --

    Torsten

[Chronon]

3.14 is very old now.  Does this still happen with a current build?

[tcrass]

Chronon,

I installed the current developer version (7b118ec, according to RockboxUtility), but unfortunately the problem remains.

Cheers --

    Torsten

[Chronon]

I have only ever had V1 versions of this player and haven't seen the problem you're describing.

Is the behavior the same for other USB ports (especially ones connected directly to the motherboard vs. a hub)? 

[tcrass]

Chronon,

I have only ever had V1 versions of this player and haven't seen the problem you're describing.

Is the behavior the same for other USB ports (especially ones connected directly to the motherboard vs. a hub)?

same here, no problem at all with my V1 player!

The V2 players, however, exhibited the described problem with both front panel and on-board USB ports (the latter I've tried with USB 2 and 3 ports).

Cheers --

    Torsten

[tcrass]

OK, the problem remains... I was hoping it might be a bug in the Linux kernel version I was using (4.19), but even with an up-to-date Debian Buster running the backports 5.2 kernel I experience the same problems, even on different computers. (Same with an up-to-date Win 7!)

As mentioned, no problem with the original Sansa firmware. So I could, theoretically, just boot up into Sansa mode whenever I want to transfer some files (which I do almost every day, providing my player with new podcasts). Alas, since the original firmware relies entirely on tags for organizing and presenting the audio library (no notion of a file system hierarchy whatsoever) and I've a 256 GB SD card inserted into the player, it always takes like 30 minutes for the Sansa database to refresh... (Praise to Rockbox for doing database refershs in the background!)

I remember that back in the early days Rockbox on e200 devices used to somehow summon the original Sansa USB file transfer mechanism, briefly rebooting into the original firmware. Is it still possible to compile a current Rockbox version (like 3.14) so that it still uses this ancient mechanism on USB connection? This might provide the remedy for the trouble me and my e200v2 are in...

Cheers --

    Torsten