Fixing a Sansa Clip+ stuck in a boot loop

21 Mar 2011

This is a quick post to outline the steps needed to sort out an 8GB Sansa Clip+ that's stuck on the firmware boot screen. I have had Rockbox installed on my Clip+ for some time and everything has worked flawlessly. A couple of weeks ago, however, I was having trouble booting into either Rockbox or the default Sansa firmware. Rockbox would get stuck on the loading screen while the default Sansa firmware would get stuck on the "Refreshing your media" screen.

I wasn't able to reinstall Rockbox (which I figured to be the root of the problem) but I finally managed to get into the default firmware (if you've got Rockbox installed, hold left while powering the Clip on). The disk did not mount though so I couldn't update the Rockbox install. A quick look at dmesg showed there was a problem.

There was no dice mounting /dev/disk1 manually either, so I popped open Disk Utility to see what it had to say. After hitting "verify disk," I was confronted with a bunch of filesystem errors. Hitting "repair disk" sorted this out no sweat.

If you're running Linux, just hit up some fdisk-fu, it'll achieve the same results. After this my Clip was working like a damn pro. I expect this will work if you're just running the standard firmware, but I haven't tried it.