Laptop not recognizing my sansa clip zip?

Hi I was wondering if anyone could help me with this problem. My Sansa Clip Zip work just fine when im listening to music, sound is good, screen is good and all of its controls. My only problem has been that when I hook my sansa up to my laptop wich has windows 8.1 with a newly bought USB cord, my sansa will turn on like regular but will be stuck on that start up screen none of the buttons are responsive unless i hold the power button to turn it off while on the cord. I have also unplugged it and then it will restart and say refreshing media but ive done nothing to it? It will occasionaly restart itself while connected to the cord as well. My laptop isnt recognizing that anything is plugged into it and my sansa isnt recognizing it either. Maybe theres something corrupted? Please help!

If you don’t use protected files, and have copies of all your music in your pc, I suggest that you format the player using the player’s menu-settings, system settings, format. This will delete all the songs on the player. Next set usb mode of the player to MSC-settings, system settings, usb mode, MSC. Next reconnect the player. In MSC mode the player acts as a usb flash drive when connected. now you can copy and paste folders of files to the player. 

The buttons on the player are not supposed to be responsive while the player is making a data connection to the pc.