Follow this procedure when the Sansa Connect Recovery Tool won't work!

PromisedPlanet: Kudos on your in-depth research on and sharing of info for the wifi-“inizing” of the Sansa Connect. As impressed new owners of 2 white box units, we are in XP, and at step #3,  but not savvy as to “In the same directory, create a file called recovery.bat containing the lines” 

If you might take time to explain accomplishing that procedure, we would be most appreciative!

Howdy;

I originally describing making a batch file (recovery.bat) to execute the two commands ( the ones that begin with “zsi_fw.exe” and “zaprecover.exe” ), but that’s not really necessary.  You can do the following instead:

a) Open a command window (start->run, enter “cmd”, press return)

b) Enter the following into the command window (be sure to include the quotes):

c:

cd “\Program Files\SanDisk\Sansa Connect Device Recovery\cmdline”

c) Copy-and-paste each of the two commands for updating the firmware, one at a time, into your command window.  Make sure the first one is complete before doing the second one.  To paste into a command window, you just right-click within the command window and select “paste”.  Here are the commands again:

zsi_fw.exe -w everest_vmlinux_ext_prod_1.1.1.50239.srr.e everest_initrd_ext_prod_1.1.1.50239.srr.e

 

zaprecover.exe -t 600000 -f yeverest_zap_ota_rel_1.1.2.65799.tar.gz.e yeverest_zap_ota_rel_ext_prod_1.1.2.65799.sig

Message Edited by PromisedPlanet on 01-05-2010 05:31 PM

Mission accomplished courtesy of your “dumbing down” the .bat file procedure for us! The Connect is such a cool little unit, and recovering its wifi feature courtesy of your postings makes its that much more of a treat! Thank you very much for sharing your knowledge!

I have downloaded both links you put up, but the othe stuff confuses me…

NinjaofCaedus wrote:
I have downloaded both links you put up, but the othe stuff confuses me…

OK, well, if you want help, post another note telling us what’s confusing you.  We can’t read your mind.

Hi folks, I followed these instructions to the _T_, after trying the normal methods of recovery.  I have repeated it after charging over and over and it does the same thing in every case.  The recovery software every time always says it was successful, but the player itself goes through “Receiving software”, followed by “Verifying Software”, and then “Installing Software” – and during the “Installing Software”, it also displays “Can’t Find Image”.  At this point, it fails with an “Error” and then tries to reboot.  When it reboots, it starts loading normally, but after going through the first purple icon, it crashes on the second icon, faults to “Error” and then shuts down.

I am at my wits end.  I have tried this on Windows 7 and Windows XP systems.

Please help.

Please copy and paste your entire recovery session from the command window to a new post here.

I reloaded my player sometime back using the great instructions found here and it gets internet radio and I don’t think I entered any information about any on-line music account but it plays and works great.  The problem is i really like the classic rock channel it has and would like to know what service it’s being streamed from so that I could subscrbe one of my other players to it.  Does anyone know what service the connect streams from now ??

It’s still Yahoo Launchcast:

http://new.music.yahoo.com/launchcast/

PromisedPlanet wrote: 

Regarding viruses etc., they are targeted towards operating systems, like Windows.  The Connect does not run an operating system.  Also, it isn’t a general networking device, it only downloads audio streams and Flickr photos (with the necessary uploaded information only for authentication and to receive the streams/photos).

Nit pick: the Sansa Connect firmware is Linux + busybox LUA and more.  So it does run an OS.  But your point is well-taken.

(I’m here because I’m thinking about buying a Sansa Connect and I am trying to figure out the lay of the land.  Too bad that the SC won’t load firmware that isn’t cryptographically signed by Zing.  As was pointed out (by you, I think) this is a great resource for understanding the guts of the SC.)

I just registered to say Thanks PromisedPlanet for the process to get the wifi radio working on my refurbed connect!!

@coryconklin wrote:
I just registered to say Thanks PromisedPlanet for the process to get the wifi radio working on my refurbed connect!!

You may have done that work for nothing, sadly. Many users (myself included) have been unable to connect for a couple of weeks now, and it’s feared that Yahoo may have pulled the plug on Connect support.

to coryconklin - since you recently posted that you had found the process to get wifi working on your connect, I thought I’d ask if you’d gotten it to work with wifi. I’m assuming not, since most others are not. Just curious whether a “start over” from scratch of loading the older OS and re-entering Yahoo info (password) might get these things functional again. I haven’t gone that route yet and so far am experiencing the “Can’t find station…” message on my connect that I setup for wifi months ago. Maybe someone will figure out a work around. The connect is still a pretty nice player for cheap. Good luck to you.

Just curious whether a “start over” from scratch of loading the older OS and re-entering Yahoo info (password) might get these things functional again. I haven’t gone that route yet and so far am experiencing the “Can’t find station…” message on my connect that I setup for wifi months ago. Maybe someone will figure out a work around. The connect is still a pretty nice player for cheap. Good luck to you.

You could try this, but I doubt it would work.  More likely, music streaming has been cut off to the Sansa Connect.  Sandisk would have no reason to continue paying Yahoo to provide music streaming to a discontinued player.  I’m actually surprised it lasted as long as it did … probably some contract expired, or something like that.

The Flickr photo stream no longer works as well.

Darn!

CASansa wrote:

The Flickr photo stream no longer works as well.

 

Darn!

Access to Flickr “Your Photos” still works, I just tested it.

“Today’s Most Interesting” isn’t working, though I don’t know if that’s temporary.

That’s what I meant. I don’t have any personal photos on Flickr.

The daily photos are working for me.

I’ve been trying mutiple times to apply these procedures to recover my sisters sansa connect and am now quite stuck. As soon as I connect the device (showing “recovery needed”) to my laptop, the screen changes to “recovering…please wait” and never changes no matter how long I wait. The command line reports “device failed to open” and “Failed to getusbdevicefilename err - 0”.  turning the device off and redoing the 3 button device reset doesn’t help. Any suggestions would be very appreciated. Thanks.

dedward2 wrote:
I’ve been trying mutiple times to apply these procedures to recover my sisters sansa connect and am now quite stuck. As soon as I connect the device (showing “recovery needed”) to my laptop, the screen changes to “recovering…please wait” and never changes no matter how long I wait. The command line reports “device failed to open” and “Failed to getusbdevicefilename err - 0”.  turning the device off and redoing the 3 button device reset doesn’t help. Any suggestions would be very appreciated. Thanks.

It sounds like you might just be having some basic USB problems.  Have you tried different USB ports on your laptop?  I believe the Sansa Connect requires a “high power” USB port, and most computers, especially laptops, have a mix of high power and low power USB ports.  If you haven’t already, try a USB port on the back of your laptop.

Also, there is now a working version of the Recovery Tool.  It installs the no-WiFi version of the firmware.  The only WiFi feature that will now work with the Connect is Flickr photos (Launchcast audio streams no longer work), so if you don’t care about that feature, you might as well use this version of the Recovery Tool:

http://kb.sandisk.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/863