Thanks Bob for your informative and helpfulness. I did not understand what the manual MSC mode was and I didn’t check for the mechanical connection thinking that since ubuntu can access the data partition it’s OK. Finally I did not understand Checktook (in the last paragraph) but I did find the blog link easy to follow along.
I followed the steps on two different machines, two distributions of ubuntu 9.1 and got the same results. At the point where the blog says “notice the scroll wheel blinks once” it did not blink though the recover command did report completely every line and “Execution started!”. The partition did not automatically mount nor was I able to see it with gparted nor in /media. I was still able to access the data files.
The only discrepancies I noticed were when I connected the Sansa and typed lsusb. The result was:
Bus 002: ID 0781:0720 Sandisk Corp. Sansa C200 series in recovery mode.
I can’t check the screenshot of the output on the blog, my browsers won’t make it readable with any magnification, but shouldn’t it be E200 instead of C200? I should have mentioned before it’s “remanufactured”. The only other thing was in the output of the e200tool recover command. In the line that reports
Searching for device xxxx.xxxx … 9 found!
it writes
Searching for device xxxx.xxxx … 9 8 found!
Thanks again for the help. I’m sorry it took me so long to get back to this. Will have to check on the warranty period.
