So I think I made an oopsie… I have a dinosaur Sansa e280. I love it to death, but it demands me to run Chdsk and format is every so often or else it refuses to play music. The last time I formatted it I had my PC do a slow format. It worked for awhile but about halfway through it told me that the device was uplugged; it was not. I restarted the formatting but it kept giving me the same error. So now when I open WMP 11 it does not show that my device is connected, and when I open My Computer it does not show the player. However, it does give me Drive (E) and Drive (F) - I have never seen Drive (F) before, this is new since my formatting accident - but when I try to open one of the Drives it tells me that the drive is not connected. My Sansa used to be Drive (E). Also, when I turn on the Sansa, it tell me “Not enough space for music DB. Please free 6 MB.” Odd, because the player is completely empty. So I know that I have corrupted a file somewhere. Help?
E is the internal memory, F is the SD slot. If F is blank its probably because you don’t have an SD card inserted.
The not enough memory error probably means that the internal file system is corrupt, which makes sense since its half formated half not formated. You can try instructing the player to format itself from recovery mode:
Thank you so much for the swift responce! I will write back as soon as I have tried what you have suggested. I love this thing and my little heart went *break* when I saw what I had done. LOL.
Alright, I am confused already… “you copy an original firmware .mi4 file (if you don’t have one try here) to the device and disconnect it” What does this mean to me? Also, “Enter recovery mode again and after copying the.mi4 file, create a file named sansa.fmt on the device.” What does this mean to me as well?
Alright, I am confused already… “you copy an original firmware .mi4 file (if you don’t have one try here) to the device and disconnect it” What does this mean to me?
It means (if you’ve done it right) you’ve manually re-installed the firmware.
Also, “Enter recovery mode again and after copying the.mi4 file, create a file named sansa.fmt on the device.” What does this mean to me as well?
The sansa.fmt file tells the player to format itself when disconnected from the computer.
If you’re having to re-format and run ChkDsk so often, there’s something wrong with some of your music files. You should take a hard look at them (and their ID3 tags) before putting them on the player again. By formatting and re-installing firmware, you are treating only the symptoms, not the cause.
You don’t understand - I do not know what to do with the instructions the website is giving me. How do I create the file to format it? How do I copy the .mi4 file? It must not have done it itself, because when I unplugged it from the PC, nothing spectaculiar happened.
You don’t understand - I do not know what to do with the instructions the website is giving me. How do I create the file to format it? How do I copy the .mi4 file? It must not have done it itself, because when I unplugged it from the PC, nothing spectaculiar happened.
.mi4 files are firmware updates. You can download them from these forums. How you create a new file depends on your operating system. On Windows you can do so by right clicking and choosing “New > text file” and then renaming it.
step 1: enter recovery mode: move “hold” to orange position, press rec+menu until it says “welcome to recovery mode”.
step 2: connect your sansa to the computer with the usb cable. a new drive should appear on “my computer”. do not make any changes to this drive if it is not stated dricetly.
now you can disconnect, and the sansa will format itself and install new firmware.
hope this helps.
There is no recovery mode for a V2 player, they’re not based on pp5022 chip. Anyone with recovery mode who copies that firmware to their player will completely destroy it. This is why you really shouldn’t try to rewrite those instructions. They’re written by people who figured them out through (expensive) trial and error. Adding things now is just going to break people’s mp3 players . . .
Plugged my MP3 player in –> recovery mode ( turn on lock/hold key, hold down record, hit power button)
Then my MP3 player’s screen told me it was in recovery mode; my PC asked if I wanted to open the 16 MB drive - I said Yes.
This is where I get confused… I do not know what copying the .mi4 files mean. Do I do that? Does the MP3 player do it on it’s own? Where do I find the files? Once I have the files, what do I do with them?
I then unplugged just to see what would happen - nothing new happened.
I then put it back in recovery mode and plugged it in, went into the 16 MB drive.
I created a text file named sansa.fmt, saved, then disconnected.
What do you mean, “explain what I did…”? Which part? I just explained what I did after you gave me the link to show me how to fix it. The link that I followed was in your first post, I believe.
“I created the new file titled “sansa.fmt” and when I restarted my device, nothing new happened. ”
How did you create the file? Where did you copy it? When you rebooted what happened?
Since doing the wrong thing here will destroy your mp3 player I’d think you’d want to be quite careful in explaining your steps so that someone doesn’t tell you to do the wrong thing . . .
