Fuze+ crashes frequently

MP3 players All other MP3 players
1

Before I begin, I believe my problem is unique in that I’ve never read of anyone else having these issues.

Although I absolutely love the performance/cost ratio of the entire Sandisk line (and accordingly having owned the View, e2x0, Fuze, and recently purchasing the Fuze+), I can’t help but be disappointed when my brand-new audio player can’t read my music.

Let me explain; I have a library of roughly 12gb of FLACs, carried over from my 4GB Fuze.   Given that I’ve never had a problem with any of this music, I simply dragged and dropped all of these files to my brand-new 16GB Fuze+, expecting nothing to happen.

Wrong, it entered a state of entering the “loading” menu, crashing, and rebooting; and repeated this process indefinitely (I’ve left it on for 2 hours in this state).  I then transferred all this music back to my PC, and installed the latest firmware (1.32.00 or whatnot).  Following this, I retransferred; lo and behold, it continued to crash repeatedly.  As I was on the newest firmware, there really wasn’t much left for me to do but transfer on individual albums to try and see what was going on.  Accordingly, I spent roughly 2-3 hours transferring and retransferring music, and on numerous occasions coming close to quitting and demanding a refund from the store I bought this from.  In the end, there were something like two albums that were causing problems (for some unknown reason), but I was satisfied overall and didn’t mention anything.

Today, being frustrated with how ugly the replacement backgrounds for album art are, I decided to go and tag all my music.  This two-hour process left me with 600 tracks that would theoretically play on the Fuze; what instead happened was that it entered what I now dub “crash mode”, crashing and rebooting instead of loading my music.  I’m now currently in the process of doing my second round of transferring-individual-albums-to-see-what’s-wrong, and am highly dissatisfied with my purchase.

So my question to you, Sandisk staff, is why this is occurring, and how I can fix it instead of attempting to bypass it with idiotically time-consuming methods.  Here are the relevant circumstances:
Library: ~400-600 songs, FLAC; ~50 songs, MP3; ~13-14GB total.

Songs: 95% Japanese, with English (or rather, romanized) tags; album art now exists, ranging from 300x300 to 500x500 embedded JPEGs.

Transfer method causing crashes: Large-scale transfer of 4-5GB at a time has always caused crashes; individual albums usually is fine.

EDIT: I just got my first error message (after around 30-40 crashes) that there has been a “Database Error!Please Reformat!”, followed by “Sansa will now shut down.”  Curiously, deleting all the hidden files and folders on the Fuze “fixes” this database error.

2

I don’t have an answer but have the same problem. My Fuze+ won’t turn on and only comes up with a message that says Database Error, please re-format the device. this is what I did.

I went into the device under My Computer and clicked on format. a window popped up saying that windows was unable to format the device. I tried to delete all file frm the device about 12 times and each time after failing to format the device, it would but the deleted files back on the device. I even deleted the files on WMP, but WMP just re-synced all the files. Help Needed!!!

3

Perhaps there’s a problem with the FAT32 partition. If so, running a CHKDSK might help. Or, it might just be easier to reformat form the Settings menu.

If you still have problems, the only solution I can recommend if Rockbox. In my experience, it doesn’t crash as often, with the crashes I do experience being easy to reproduce (and therefore, easy to learn to avoid). Also, unlike the Sandisk firmware, Rockbox actually has someone working to fix the various glitches Rockbox has on this device.

To make things even better, Rockbox’s media handling is far superior to that of the Sandisk firmare. although Rockbox has a database feature, it doesn’t require that you actually use it. You can go an entire lifetime without having to ever perform a single refresh, even if the device crashes. If, however,  you choose to use it, you’ll find that Rockbox’s database refreshes much faster than that of the Sandisk firmware. Not only that, but it also is capable of refreshing your database “in the background”, meaning you can continue to use the device during the refresh.

You can also use the Sandisk firmware at anytime by turning the device off, and pressing and holding the volume down and power buttons at the same time.