Empty Handed

I have a Sansa e280 MP3 player, and very good it is too. Yesterday, however, it crashed. I can’t remember exactly what I was doing, arsing around with the MicroSD expansion card, or something. Anyway, usually a hard-reset does the trick, and it restarts no problem. This time though it didn’t and it just kept restarting itself and trying to refresh the database, but then restarting again, all the while the screen looking very corrupt and messy, as though the screen had been physically damaged. Running the battery right down and recharging made no difference, and plugging it in to the PC made no difference either.

Thanks to the internet, I found how to fix it. Took a while to find though. Didn’t find it last night (error occurred yesterday) and earlier today I’d more or less resigned myself to dumping it, but I found this tonight…

Recovery mode on the Sansa e200 series

…and that did the trick. Also, the linked page here is very useful.

I’m going to cut ‘n’ paste some of the advice here, just as a mirror. If the author (Alfmeister) wants me to remove it, no problems, let me know.

I repaired my player in this order:
1. Turn off the player buy holding down the menu button for about 10 seconds or however long it takes to turn the screen black.
2. Set the hold switch to on (shows red.} Hold down the record button on the left side of the player while pressing the menu button.
3. The player will run in a similar manner to using safe mode on a computer. That is it works just enough for you to connect it to your computer to make the necessary repairs.
It will prompt you to connect the player to the computer and then it will display that it is connected in basic text.
4. Now you need to download new firmware.
The latest I could find that I trusted (from the SanDisk site) was version 1.02.12.
5. Now run the firmware you just downloaded (the .exe file.) It will ask you if you want to reformat the player which will erase all of your stored data. Say no if you think you know when the problem first occurred so that you can correct it. After the player installs the fresh firmware it prompt you to safely disconnect the player which you do by clicking on the small drive button in the system tray which reads ‘Safely Remove Hardware’ and selecting the Sansa drive letter. Now click Finish.
6. Your player will restart and this time (fingers crossed) it will reload the database and will function normally. The database refresh will take longer than normal because it’s reading the entire database. Now your player will ‘come back to life’ and you will swear never to install any files that you haven’t checked (until you do it again!)
7. Reconnect the player. If you have the Sansa Updater already installed it will prompt you with the message that new firmware is available. At this writing that will be 1.02.15.

Also, in a bid to help out anyone else trying to search through the millions of pages mentioning Sansa and crash~, some key words:

• sansa
• corrupt
• hard-reset
• crash cycle
• trashed

That’s bound to help.