Comments on: How my own stupidity killed my Sansa Clip

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 23:41:52 +0000

I’m a moron too.

I did almost the same thing. I recently bought a tiny Sansa Clip 1GB and had “a few issues” with it and my Ubuntu Hardy Heron. So I dug into the online forums at SanDisk, anythingbutipod.com and UbuntuForums and read repeatedly that if all else fails, just reformat the Sansa Clip.

I took that advice literally unfortunately, and used gparted to put a new disklabel (MSDOS) on the device, created one single partition and installed a FAT32 filesystem, thinking that the Clip’s own firmware would repopulate the new filesystem with the direcories and files it would need.

Well, no. So I have a cute little plastic brick that I have been looking woefully at for a few days, having posted several pleas for help at various forums and to SanDisk tech support without response.

So now I read that perhaps SanDisk’s little Windows-only Sansa Updater utility might be able to not only install new firmware, but restore the entire flash memory of the Clip to factory specs?! That’s great. I’ll find the nearest Windows computer and try it. Thanks very much for posting this story and helping others in the same situation!

-Steve

By: ubuntucat

ubuntucat — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 09:19:00 +0000

What I am impressed about with Mandriva is the graphical frontends it has for configuring things. That’s one of the biggest complaints that new Ubuntu users have, and with Mandriva’s Control Center, you can tweak just about anything.

That said, I’ll play around with this a bit longer but will probably switch back to some kind of *buntu. Maybe I’ll even give Xandros another spin, if only for its super-fast boot time.

By: LinuxCanuck

LinuxCanuck — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 07:45:57 +0000

Great ending to your saga. I am glad that you were able to recover your Sansa clip. I have similar feelings about Mandriva. It is a long installation and it is not as good as Ubuntu, but better than many RPM based distros.
I am looking forward to Intrepid. I have used the alpha and just downloaded the beta to try. It is smoking fast to boot up and applications seem to run faster, too.
Thanks for you blog. I look forward to reading more.

By: ubuntucat

ubuntucat — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 21:31:55 +0000

All right, indeed. Thank you for a third time.

By: kef

kef — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 21:06:10 +0000

portable audio players with crappy documentation – 0
ubuntu community – 2
alright!!

By: ubuntucat

ubuntucat — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 18:16:32 +0000

You are a life saver, kef. Thanks! I didn’t realize there was software that could help. I used the Windows Sansa updater thing, and it worked. It’s now restored to factory settings.

Thanks again!

By: kef

kef — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 17:56:09 +0000

i had a similar situation in my hands not too long ago.
while i was uploading some tunes to my audio player the electricity went out for a little while, long story short the partition on my player was erased (the player wouldnt turn on, my computer could detect the player and charge it but couldnt open the contents in nautilus) and the only way i could re-create the partition was with windows xp’s installer.

you mentioned that your player is totally bricked but since you have nothing to lose, you might want to give xp installer a try.