I finally got past this and found a fix. I held down the power button until it got to the message “Refreshing your meida.” That task never couldn’t complete, so the player stayed on until the battery failed. Then I attached the Clip Player to a USB port on my Windows 7 PC. Amazingly the PC once again recognized it as a valid device, and, from Windows Media Player I was able to reformat it After that it worked normally again.