Two days ago my Clip+ stopped playing music in the middle of a track and after that it did not respond to any key pressed. The only way to switch it off was to hold the on/off button for about half a minute. Then it just would not switch on. After trying to reset it again I still had no luck. No response by connecting to the computer. (btw. I was using rockbox 3.10 as a firmware)
I waited until the battery supposedly depleted, and tried to switch it on then by connecting it to the computer. Surprisingly it switched on, viewing the usual file transfer screen of the clip+, but there was no working drive. Windows wants to format it, linux just can’t mount it. I checked, how the device looked like, and only a 4 MB device is recognized (instead of 8GB). I cannot be formatted nor partitioned.
After detaching and pulling out it cannot jump back to the normal menu (original Sansa) as it used to. Thus I cannot perform a format.
Sometimes it switches on, and boots into rockbox. Then the problem is, that the filesystem is useless. I can still browse the folders, but cannot do much more. Playlist file is corrupted, cannot delete it. Cannot delete anything else either. Neither music nor any other files.
It was completely dry, no phisical harm was done to it before and it is more than 2 years old.
I thought this 4 Mb partition might be for the firmware, but it is much larger so it cannot be “dd”-d on it.
So it looks like I can trow it away, but these moments of partial ressurrections prevent me to do that. This 4mb large device, however, makes me think of a memory problem, which would be strange regarding the relatively rare copy to the device. Does anyone have any ideas how to make sure if it is a hardware fault?