V2 stuck on refresh in original FW, it's SDHC card

I have a Rockboxed V2 Fuze that I’ve still been running 3.10 Rockbox build on, which means I’ve had to transfer stuff onto the player via the original firmware. (I know 3.11 is out, I’ll deal with that when I solve this issue). The player is set at MSC for USB mode.

Yesterday, when I attempted to boot up in the original firmware, it gave me the “refreshing media” dialog box and just stuck there, I’d say about 10 or 20 percent. Simply will not move any farther.

Trying different things to diagnose this problem, I took the micro SDHC card out of the player, and it boots up fine. You put the card back in, it sticks on refreshing media again.

I removed the card again and put it in my computer … reads it fine … backed up the data and formatted the card multiple times in FAT32. It still hangs on refresh.

I was able to force the computer to read the player with the power switch in hold/hold down RW key trick, so I guess I can back-door my way into loading data onto it and I only use Rockbox to play stuff. But does anybody have a clue what’s going on here or any other suggestions for how to fix it?

It doesn’t make sense, but it may work.

Backup any content you have on the unit. Take out the SD card. Format the unit with its own firmware (Settings/System Settings/Format).

What seems to happen is that the firmware just gets junked up with stray bits of data, which somehow messes up its communications with the card slot. Formatting cleans up the mess. 

I don’t know if you’ll have to reinstall Rockbox after formatting, but you probably will, so you might as well update Rockbox too while you’re at it.

Ususally freeze-ups in the refreshing database cycle are caused by the inability of the player (OF) to read one or more of the ID3 tags of the files (in your case) on the card. You can check and/or edit them with MP3Tag. Make sure they are all in the format ID3v2.3 ISO08859-1. You can change this default setting in the Tools menu of the program and change them en masse (all at once). Just open the entire “cirectory” on the card in the program and hit the SAVE button. This will re-write them all that are different to the same format.

Note you should probably do this with the files on your computer; delete the current ones on the card, then re-transfer over the newly edited files to the card again.

Tapeworm, agreed about bad tags being the usual cause…

But the OP formatted the microSD already–destroying any bad tags–and the unit gets stuck with it in, boots up easily without it.

I had this problem with a Fuze of my own–stuck on Refreshing with an empty card in the slot, fine without it. The Format trick worked.