I was perusing the forums today and found a post referring to a “recovery mode”, but with no instructions of how to get there. After a quick search, I figured out how (hold Volume Up while plugging in the cable, then wait for the player to be “detected” by the computer). I couldn’t access the Fuze+'s storage, and Sansa Firmware Updater could not detect the player.
I then got the idea to hold Volume Down while plugging in the player since holding Volume Down + Power boots the Sansa firmware, and instead of getting the Rockbox status screen (the one the Rockbox bootloader displays while connected to a computer), I got the Sansa “device connected” screen, and it showed up as an unformatted storage device. I formatted the player using FAT32 and, after unplugging, the Sansa firmware finally worked without giving me the database error! I’ve since updated to the latest Sansa firmware, and reinstalled the Rockbox bootloader.
Solution
If you use Rockbox, press the Volume Down button while connecting your Fuze+ to a computer to have the Sansa firmware handle USB functions.
It seems that the Rockbox bootloader reports device layout settings to the computer that the Sansa firmware doesn’t like and the computer will, by default, blindly trust whatever a storage device reports to it since that is normally correct.
