With the acquisition of a new mp3 player, and because the old one didn't really do anything but drain the power out of a little battery by lighting the screen up, Tara didn't really want the old one anymore. What do you (meaning me, really) do with a mostly broken mp3 player? Take it apart, of course. No warranties were actually voided during this process. It was just a tag line to catch your eye... The mp3 player would not respond when being plugged into the computer, and acted like the thing was full. Windows would not reformat the drive, and linux would only mount the thing read only. Then the thing stopped booting up, it has been like that for about 3 or 4 weeks at this point. For anyone else's reference, this was a Sansa c150, which died after a years use. (But it was a lot of use in that year, and we got it on a deal last year...)
It took me a little bit to figure out how to get the cover off, but eventually I found a little battery in the device. My theory very quickly became that if I could get the battery out, the thing would reset and I would be able to plug the unit into the computer again. The battery was very well secured into the place it was in, so I took the little LCD screen apart to see why there was white light leaking out behind it. (They had a silver paper over the back, with a white LED that backlit the display so they didn't have to make it light up as much. I assume it was a power efficiency thing.) Eventually I got back to the battery, and could not get it safely off the little thing, so it got torn out of the unit. I tried booting the thing up after that, it still didn't work, until I shorted the connections where the battery used to be. The thing browned out, and booted up. The first screen told me that I needed to free space on the device. It booted up, but where words used to be on all the menus, there was blanks. (It still does that, for some reason.)
Linux kept reporting the right device when you plug it in, but gave a bunch of I/O errors when the system tried accessing the disk. The system eventually gave up on the drive because of the errors. After one of the brownouts, the system didn't fully give up on the device file itself, so I got linux to delete the disk partition on the thing. Suddenly I was able to start and stop the device normally, and didn't need to keep shorting out the device. I put it back together without the battery. (Not sure what the function of the battery is, really.)
After deleting the disk partition, I wasn't able to get Linux to mount the drive. I booted to Windows, which pretended to see the disk, but would never mount it as a disk, either. I tried doing a SanDisk firmware update, but that failed.
At this point, the radio works. I am thinking about putting it in the freezer for a while to see what happens...
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