All songs disappeared from MUSIC folder

Pardon the amount of detail in this posting. I’m probably covering old ground here, but I don’t have this device a long time and want the most up-to-date advice.

I have a week-old 8GB Sansa Clip. First thing I did after taking it out of the packaging was to install firmware version : 02.01.32

I’ve been listening to it in work and because I’m frequently interrupted I pause playback and the clip powers itself down after a Sleep time of 5 minutes.

After one such power-down I tried to start the clip up again. I got the following:

  - Sansa logo for approx 10 seconds. This is much longer than usual.

  - Screen then changes to playback view. Song paused.

  - Playback simply doesn’t work: no sound, no progress-bar. Same goes for any of the 300 songs on the device : no play, only pause.

  - Radio still functions.

Hooked the player up to the PC in MSC mode and the MUSIC folder, former home to my 300 songs, is empty. However, disk properties still show approx 1GB of used space. So, as per other postings, I used the Sansa Clip’s own “Format” function to re-format and I loaded a few songs into the MUSIC folder. Normal service has resumed, for the time being.

Is this behaviour normal for the Sansa Clip? Is there any way to deal with it other than a re-format?

It gets better :

The album of songs I copied into the MUSIC folder after I re-formatted have also been deleted… a few minutes after putting these songs onto the Clip I power-cycled the device and all songs were gone.

Either I’m savagely misusing this device (and I don’t believe I am) or it has real software problems.

The same exact thing happened with my week-old Sansa clip 8GB that I had loaded with 400+ songs.  I did not reformat just reloaded most of the songs.  But I am more concerned about the 2.1GB of “used space”.  Do you have an update on this issue?  This is my first Sandisk purchase and may be my last.

If I read your post correctly your 400 songs disappeared but the disk-space usage of the player still showed that 2.1GB of the Clip’s capacity is being consumed.

In my case I straight away used the Sansa Clips Settings->Format function.  After the Format was complete the disk-space used by the lost songs was recovered, i.e. disk capacity returned to maximum.

Unfortunately it would mean loading your 400 tracks again…

For the record, I seem to have had the same problem happen to me today on my Sansa Clip 2 GB. About 2 weeks ago, I updated my Clip’s firmware.

Last night, I was listening to music, and powered off the clip to go to bed. Today I turned on the clip, and the Sansa emblem was displayed on screen approximately 3 times longer than usual, followed by either the “refreshing your media” or the “updating data base” message, I forget which. The refreshing of the data base message normally only occurs after the clip has been disconnected from the pc after files have been added or removed. When I attempted to play any song, it would show the songs title, album etc., but would default to pause. Pushing play would display the playing arrow, but the song would not play, nor would it fast-forward. When I plugged the clip into the computer in MTP mode, none of my music files showed up in the music folder, however the space taken up by the files was still there, meaning the information was still there. I then connected the clip via MSC, with the same result. I added a music file to the music folder, forcing the clip to refresh the database after disconnection, but then the other music files disappeared from the menu, with only the newly added song showing. I then ran Windows XP’s Check Disk tool on my clip, with the fix errors and the recover bad sectors options checked. After this, I disconnected the clip and all the songs showed back up in the menu, and played. Reconnecting the clip to the pc in MTP, I saw that my songs were still not visible in the music folder. Reconnecting the clip to the pc in MSC, I saw that the Check Disk tool had created a folder called “Found000” in the clip. This folder apparently contained all the music information that Check Disk recovered, though modified. I decided to delete this folder, and start from scratch. After deleting this folder, I used the Clip’s Settings/Format option, to make sure I got rid of any left over junk. I then put all my song files back into the clip, and everything seems to be working normally. I hope this long-winded post is helpful.

had this same prob, only disk checker only found 49/350+ songs. and they wont show up in msc or mtp mode on pc.

I use my Sandisk Clip player to listen to audio books.  I lost all of my books in the same way you lost your songs.  I’m baffled–temporarily, at least.

probably time to rma the player under warranty.