Obstacles to happiness

I’ve given a lot of thought to older device use lately, well ongoing for many, many months now.

I love modern devices, but there is something Neo-Victorian in me that is reviving old things, and putting them to use as well as I can. [<3]  [things for one purpose, when all-in-one gadgets surround me.]

Latest one specifically was painful. This is a tale of idiocy, one (dumb) look at this device connected to my computer I was tired and somehow mistakenly let windows format it, uh, not really, but it happened, and Windows hates being friendly to fixing devices.

So there I was. I had an old Sansa E280v1 with Rock Box, it worked fine, I was gearing up to fill it up new and use it a lot more than I have since getting Google Music. Then suddenly it had the Blue Ring of Death. No!

Two days I spent downloading and making usb sticks and dvd’s for Live Ubuntu.  [I don’t have a linux distro of any sort installed anywhere. #%&#(*& This is not how I want to roll through life. I have had some way to boot into Ubuntu or Fedora easily, in the past.]

None of the Live USB or DVD Ubuntu worked to rescue my poor Sansa E280 though. There is decent information online that can aide one in fixing their devices similar to mine.

I was searching for “why” about all the errors as to file or folder not found, sharedlibrary stuff, and … so much more. Head banging against brick wall sort of thing.

Basically it just wouldn’t work. The wonderful e200tool couldn’t do anything.

So the one computer I could fool around with, maybe dual-boot, or just, who cares if it messes anything up since it doesn’t work so well in the first place… HP Envy Sleekbook is a piece of trash. Glorified disposable browsing/streaming computer. It’s taped all around the monitor, touch comes and goes on the screen, sometimes it just won’t work, worse than that.

The 500gb drive was already partitioned and the second partition was raw space.

OMG the pain here. I couldn’t get the USB Live to install. I was downloading older versions of Ubuntu trying to get something to work to revive my player. They all virtually did the same thing.

I started working on a full install of Ubuntu, but it wouldn’t work via the usb stick, it wouldn’t work from the windows desktop. There was nothing I could do, this “netbook” has nothing else to give portal to!

I figured out to use Wubi.exe first, but then it didn’t work as described It was supposed to install the .iso fine, but would call for something online which isn’t there, but was supposed to work offline (with your internet off.) Nope. It barked same error on or offline.  Further USB Live installs failed, and the harddrive was in a huge mess.

Thankful for this being a hobby computer!  Pain, pain was great. I somehow got Ubuntu 16 to install fully, but not work, re-install, failed at Grub fatally. Jumping over obstacles, I was reading, and doing and feeling at war.

Eventually last night I actually had Ubuntu installed, but no Grub. I worked and worked on that for a long time. I swore what I had done had to have taken, but I still couldn’t find a Grub menu … and slowly suddenly it came up once and I took that opportunity to get into the real install of Ubuntu for the first time, connected my player, and ran the e200tool, shared library error.

I found more posts about it. Ended up terminal libusb-dev and then sending update everthing commands, and who knows what it was but something knocked it loose and I had action, Oh joy Welcome to Recovery showed on my Sansa.

First run stopped after finding my device, next run ran all the way and bingo there’s my 16mb drive. I copied the three files into it, disconnected and Formatting and reboot,  into Sansa Firmware. Once that was that, I connected to my Windows 10 PC and ran Rockbox Utility, back in business, but better than before, I like freshening things up.

That HP sleekbook is now my Ubuntu device, Windows is GONE. I didn’t like Win 10 on it. Redundant and useless. I have better Windows to work with, and if I just want to “hang” I use Android, not Windows.

The thing about data and OS and everything that exists today, I feel like I am mad at myself for not knowing how-to linux anything I want. Why don’t I SSH to my websites either?

I hate you GUI. <—that’s it. It’s  a draw, and makes me feel dull. Stupid Matrix.

For my own sanity I have put the pieces for this fix on my website here. I got them from various sources easily found but specifically varied as to where I got them, all on that search link above.

• Sansa-e200tool-pack