Need help recovering a bricked Sansa from "Tango Mode"

[FalconFour]

I've got a fair share of technical expertise, but I simply don't have any experience with materializing tools and experience from thin air regarding a specialized piece of hardware. So I'm really hoping the Sansa community can help me out with my current predicament.

Long story short, I got sick of the unending bugs in my Sansa View 8gb, which were all software related, and the Sansa pretty much offered no way to fully (and I mean FULLY) reformat itself to the factory imaged firmware. So I did what I thought would be sensible. I fully backed up the View in MSC mode using a hex editor - created a full flat image of the entire storage device, then proceeded to use that same tool to wipe the entire physical media with zeros. I've now got a 8,220,311,552-byte file sitting on my desktop.

It proceeded to brick itself. Okay, that was to be expected. What was not, however, to be expected, was that I was then unable to do ANYTHING AT ALL with it. No "Sansa" logo, no recovery mode. Just "Tango Media Platform". No matter what I held as I plugged it in, Tango Media Platform, blue ring, that's it. Dead.

So I currently have no interface with which to restore my backup, or reflash the original firmware! I don't think I'm much better off right now. In fact, I think I may say I pretty much screwed up bad.

Someone out there on the internets, PLEASE tell me you've got something, some tool, some driver, Linux, Windows, Mac or otherwise, that can get this thing back to life. Anyone?

[CrowdAds]

[saratoga]

I think you're in manufacturing mode, which on the e200v1 can be fixed with e200tool. That would make sense since on the e200v1 (which the View is very closely related to), erasing the firmware as you have done will give you this.

Unfortunately no one has completed a viewtool yet, so you probably cannot fix your player (at least not without using a fair amount of technical expertise to port e200tool to the view).

[FalconFour]

I'd been looking at that e200tool. A lot of people say the View is quite similar to the e200, so I'd been looking down that path. And yeah, it seems to have a different chipset, but I wonder just how different it is internally.

That got me wondering. Just what kind of work was involved in creating e200tool to begin with? I imagine if it's possible to create e200tool using information currently available, what would prevent me (or anyone else) from using that same technique with an existing hack's code (e200tool) to port it to the View?

[saratoga]

Originally Posted by FalconFour

And yeah, it seems to have a different chipset, but I wonder just how different it is internally.

6000 series PP instead of 5000 series. The dual ARM7TDMI are replaced with a single ARM9 core. Theres some Nvidia display hardware. Some of the peripherals are the same or similar.

Originally Posted by FalconFour

That got me wondering. Just what kind of work was involved in creating e200tool to begin with? I imagine if it's possible to create e200tool using information currently available, what would prevent me (or anyone else) from using that same technique with an existing hack's code (e200tool) to port it to the View?

Someone calling himself "Mr.H" reverse engineered the e200v1's firmware and combined it with what was already known about previous PP chips to get a basic bootloader type program running on the e200. This is then uploaded via e200tool, which can then tell the uploaded program to load code into memory. The loaded code can be the Sandisk firmware, which is how an e200 is recovered.

[FalconFour]

Hell. That's a lot of work for someone with nearly zero experience programming on these things. I'm almost to the point of just donating my View to a coder that can break it... I know there are a LOT of people dying to get a Rockbox port for the View. Maybe knowing there's nothing that can break it more, can make it more useful?