Clip Zip 4G White firmware update

I bought one of these little gems a few years ago and it has been very useful.  The perfect size to record stupid people saying stupid things to me, not to mention useful for playing music.

Lo, it came to be that one day it stopped working.  I suspect foul play, but it’s pretty tough to diagnose when the device behaves very much like a small brick.  Connected to USB, the thing presents as a 4MB (yes MB) /dev/sdb volume.  A hexdump of the contents shows alternating 0000 and FFFF segments which are 16-48 bytes or so:

00000000 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |…|
00000010 ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff |…|
*
00000030 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |…|
*
00000050 ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff |…|
*
00000070 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |…|
*
00000090 ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff |…|
*
000000b0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |…|
*
000000d0 ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff |…|
*

.

.

.

To my amateur embedded dev-mind this looks like it might be presenting a flash partition for programming a freshly minted device, but that’s only a guess and I’m too chicken to ‘dd’ a firmware image on it blindly.

 I don’t suppose there’s any hope of updating the firmware to make it live again…  

The disply does not come on when the power button is pressed or when the device is connected to USB.  There is therefore no charging indicator.  The only symptom of life is the 4M volume detected by Linux, as above.

Firstly, I would try a reset (if you haven’t already) by pressing and holding the power button. Normally, you would do this for approx. 20 secs. but sometimes stubborn cases require up to a minute long.

Then release the power button & (crossing your fingers for luck) press again momentarily to see if the reset took and it starts up normally.

If this doesn’t help, try the reset procedure again, but this time hold the Select button at the same time. Don’t know why, but this has been reported to work occasionally.

Let us know if this helps . . .