"Refresh Database Do Not remove SD" possible solution

Having problems with “Refresh Database Do Not remove SD” this causing your player to crash?

I was having problems with sync’ing my playlists through Windows Media player 10, a few times I would get an “Unknown error” during transfer. This would cause all subsequent tracks to also have errors, and cause my express to crash (gets to the “Refresh Database Do Not remove SD”, pauses for long time, and eventually switches off – note this is not just auto screen off–the whole machine would not respond).

I tried various fixes listed on this site: reformat microSD as FAT32, tried to use MSC mode to make playlists by hand.

What worked for me appears to be to ensure that your ID3 tags on your MP3s are clean. These are the tags that contain artist and song info, etc. You can edit them manually by going to library in Media Player, selecting the track, right clicking and using “advanced tag editor”. There are also a couple of automatic programs out there that will go through and look for problems in your tags.

I found 2 major issues: (1) the player doesn’t seem to like tags with “Track” set to “0” and  (2) it doesn’t like additional tags that include URLs and images.

hope this helps someone

I am having the same problem.  When it says “Refresh Database Do Not remove SD”, is it actually doing something?  I am not sure if it is doing something I should wait out or if it is telling me to take some other action.  Is it refreshing the database?

Regarding your concern we can format the player and the card and make sure you have a backup files of your songs because it will delete all the songs in the player or you can update the firmware by following instructions by going to this link;

http://kb.sandisk.com/app/answers/detail/a\_id/446/kw/sansa%20express%20firmware%20update/r\_id/101834

If these steps dont work we can check the possiblity of the ID3 tag like what spectrin said.

:wink: 

I’m not having a crashing problem, but my SE hangs on the “Refresh Database Do Not remove SD” for a LOOOOOOOOOOONG time, every time I turn it on.

Is there a way to force the SE to skip this step?

I don’t foresee myself changing the music on my SE very often, since I have a 8gb microSD card, so the pause when starting it up is completely unnecessary.

user452 wrote:

I’m not having a crashing problem, but my SE hangs on the “Refresh Database Do Not remove SD” for a LOOOOOOOOOOONG time, every time I turn it on.

 

Spectron’s advice about the ID3 tags still applies, but even with perfect tags an 8GB card is going to take up to maybe 5 minutes to refresh the database.

And no, there’s no way to override or skip this step.

I just got my sansa express out the closet and unbricked it after all these years. I aslo just ran into this issue. I made two changes so either one might work. I formatted the card fat32 and instead of dragging and dropping I used a program (some media player that can sync your device) If send it to your sansa from your mediaplayer it will organize everything, creates a artist folder and album so the sansa may read easier when its tracks are better organized as opposed to just all in one directory. Maybe its just the reformat in fat32 I dunno but you can try either