Device not being recognised by XP

Hi. Let me first say I followed board etiquetty by checking other threads, but everyone elses problems don’t seem to be as grand as mine!

I am using a year old laptop running XP SP2, and am having mad problems getting the Sansa Clip to work on it. When I plug the lil ■■■■■■ in, i get the “bing” noise, and the little icon saying new hardware found, however there is an error of no driver suitable to run it. When i tried on my mums brand new Vista laptop, the computer just went on the internet and merrily found the driver and it was charging within minutes. I can get it to do absolutely zilch. The screen lights up, but the battery doesnt flash, it’s just solid, and then when I unplug after an hour, say, I get a few moments of battery life before it conks out.

I know my computer must be able to power this thing with the appropriate driver. Where can I get this? I have to say Sandisk’s site is pretty unhelpful with this. I found a page with a list of drivers, but none of them link anywhere!

Can someone please help me with this? P.S. I downloaded WMP11 and that didnt help as when I went to the sync screen it said no device connected. Aaarggh!!!

I also downloaded the firmware, but when I try and run the program I get this message:

Sansa Updater can only be launched by Sansa Service. 

Hi.

How do I get to MSC mode. When you say Settings, what screen should I be selecting it from?

Holding the center button down doesnt work unfortunately, tried it earlier.

Thanks, 

That didn’t work. I have the old firmware, I checked the settings screen. However, after I download the updater, it does nothing, even when I click on the executable file (see the error message I posted above).

The computer just isn’t interacting with the thing. It knows it’s their as a) the screen on the clip has the Connected symbol and b) on the add new hardware screen in Control Panel it says “Sansa Clip” but has the yellow exclamation mark with it.

I can’t get the new firmware to go on, because the computer doesn’t know to run the updater!!

Is there not a driver out there somewhere that I’m missing??

P.S. I just this second noticed that if I only put my USB cable half in teh computer, it will charge!! weird. but still no interaction. at least I can listen to the radio! 

I have the same grave problem: My computer (a WinXP SP2 w/ WMP11 Dell Laptop) recognized the player for about 2 month without a problem, and from one day to the other just gave me a “USB-device not recognized”-message. The “hold-button-trick” didn’t work on my computer, so I tried several till I found one wich I could use to update the firmware. I now changed the player to MSC-mode, but still have the same problem.

Actually I’m pretty pissed about this, especially as this problem came out of the blue for no apparant reason… 

If you can’t see the device, you can’t copy anything on it :wink:

exactly! I can’t even get that far.

its just so annoying. SanDisk, I always thought, were a trusted brand. But after my experience with this I’m avoiding them in the future. There’s literally no help on their support pages for this problem. I can’t fathom it. Just glad I didn’t fork out for the 4GB device. 

yah, nothing happens. I get the same “device connected” noise, but no pop ups and WM still doesnt recognise it.

I suppose I will have to call them, but if it costs me money I may not bother. What I’m asking isn’t that much surely? A bloody driver for XP!! Ah well. Thanks for trying. The product is just shoddy. It should come with this stuff on the cutesy little CD you get with it. 

you have a misunderstanding of the drivers.

The drivers in use belong to microsoft. So SanDisk does not own the drivers to send them out. MTP (media transfer protol) is a microsoft standerd. It comes installed on any service pack 2, or possibly a windows media player 11 update. SanDisk probably doesn’t have permission to send them out on a CD or doesn’t want to pay for the rights to do so. Which makes sense, since they are available via microsoft sites.

MSC drivers (same thing that flash drives use) also comes pre-installed on any windows XP computer.

If your having trouble recognizing it because of drivers, I would say to try it on another computer and make sure your getting the same thing on various others computers. If you run into the same thing, then I would say its defective.

If it works on others computers, then its something about the drivers on your computer. Have you checked what it says in device manager? right-click my comptuer and select "manage from the drop down menu. From here we select device manager on the left and pane. The right hand pane should refresh. Does anything appear with a “?” or a “!”. if so what does it say? you can try right-clicking on it and selecting “update driver” and do so automaticlly ;when prompted to do so.

Well, now I’m really baffled - it works when I simply use another USB-cable! As far as I can tell there is no difference between the two except that the one I usually used had a kind of “roll-up”-mechanism. And it’s not that this cable didn’t work in general as I was able to get contact to at least one computer (the one I used for the upgrade). Really weird…

Enigma, thanks for the post. I thought drivers were supposed to be on my computer, and I know that the clip does work in my mums vista laptop, so it’s not the device itself.

I dont know how to get to device manager from your instructions, but I think I found the same menu on the Add New Hardware wizard. The Sansa Clip shows with a ! and a “no driver for this device” or something like that. However, when I click update, it asks for an installation CD, or to choose from a list of random stuff. You dont happen to know the driver your computer uses (open question to anyone, you should be able to find it from the Hardware part of control panel) so I can check out Microsoft pages do ya???

Cheers! 

the drivers are on the computer itself. Some are saved as .inf files in the “windows” folder.

Thats the same device manager, theres a few ways to get to it.

It should ask you to insert a CD (which isn’t an option to get this working) or update automatically (via internet). You want to do it automatically and see what happens.

Be sure you are using WMP 10/11.  The drivers for the device are part of that package.