C250 misbehaving when connected to PC -- Help?

Hi, folks. This one’s got me stumped…

I bought a refurbed v1 c250 from Buy.com very recently and it seemed to be doing all right at first. Even now, everything appears to work fine during playback and general away-from-the-computer usage. However, I have begun having a problem recently when the device is connected to my WinXP SP2 PC in MSC mode (the mode I vastly prefer): At some point during the connection, my computer no longer recognizes the content on the device. The internal and external drives are still listed with drive letters under “My Computer,” but Windows shows the primary drive as having 0 bytes of space and opens an empty window upon double-clicking it. Alternately, it will show the files but pop up with an error message saying something like the “drive could not be found or read” when I attempt to do anything with them. Switching USB ports seemed to help for a brief moment, but I think that was a red herring, as the problem now resurfaces regardless of which port (front or rear) I’m connected to…

So far, I’ve tried reformatting the player and reinstalling the original firmware in Recovery Mode. The one time I managed to run Check Disk all the way through (i.e. without losing the connection), it seemed to finish without detecting any errors. Any other thoughts or suggestions? I’m hesitant to contact Sandisk for an RMA since I have zero interest in receiving a v2 player…

What firmware version do you have on the player?

Check under Info in the Settings menu.

Firmware version 01.01.00P. SanDisk Support has so far had me reformat the player a couple more times, in a couple different ways, but the problem persists.

A symptom I forgot to mention in my first post is that, when copying some files to the player, the transfer stalls, the player’s window becomes “Not Responsive,” and then either the drive suddenly becomes unrecognizable/empty according to Windows…or Windows Explorer crashes and I have to restart it.

One specific occurrence that might (emphasis on might) help clarify things: When I try to unzip a file to the player’s root directory (a zipped Rockbox build file to be exact), WinRAR (the unzipping program) always lags and stalls at the some point during the process. Trying it right now, the error message that WinRAR produces says, “Write error in the file .rockbox\rocks\games\sudoku.rock. Probaby the disk is full…The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error.” Earlier today, it said something about a “semaphore timeout” instead of the I/O device error part, and the problem file was blackjack.rock instead of sudoku.rock. As the zipped Rockbox folder is less than 5MB large, it clearly isn’t overfilling the freshly formatted disk of my c250. When I try to manually add the current problem files (blackjack.rock and sudoku.rock) to my c250, Windows lags and then says “Cannot copy blackjack: The path is too deep” and “Cannot copy sudoku: Cannot find the specified file. Make sure you specify the correct path and file name.” At this point, the c250’s drive suddenly shows up in Windows as containing 0 bytes as before. I don’t believe the files in question are actually bad in and of themselves, as the zipped folder has no problem being unzipped anywhere on my PC or on any of my other devices/drives. This is all specific to the c250 and its peculiar connection/drive issues. What’s strange is that I was able to unzip the very same zipped file to my player with absolutely no issues when I first got it…but now I keep getting error after error, and I personally don’t have the background to know what they all point to. At this stage, it feels like I’m chasing down a hardware issue that’s spitting out inconsistent and misleading clues…

Message Edited by epithetless on 12-19-2007 03:53 PM

It does seem like a hardware issue.

The last thing I can think of (and it’s a long shot) is to determine whether the player itself is the cause of the issue or possibly the cable… or the computer (if you haven’t tried a second computer already that is).

Yeah. I have tried multiple cables (I own an e280 as well, which my computer reads and writes to just fine) – same result with each of them – but I haven’t had a chance to connect the player to my other PC, given the long expanse of snow between me and it right now. I’ll do that whenever I can make it out to my studio.

In related news, SanDisk Support has gone quiet after their initial “Please reformat” response…Let’s hope they haven’t forgotten about me…

Thanks for taking the time to write, Bluescreen.

just so you know, SanDisk does not warranty refurbished items.

Hm. Thanks for telling me. Guess we’ll see what Buy.com has to say…

it does seem like a hardware issue and a defective player, just my 2 cents.