I have a silver 4GB Clip - got it last November from Amazon and have enjoyed it for the most part. My only problems before today have been random freezes particularly at the end of certain mp3’s (usually 3 or 4 songs out of the 4GB would freeze the unit every time they were played).
Today I was loading tracks from an XP machine (using the mode that’s drag and drop/explorer type) and got a “File could not be replaced on the device. You do not have permission to create this item” message after successfully loading ~3GB’s of music. Didn’t have time to diagnose (aside from a few reboots of both the player and my CPU) so I used the Clip for a few hours today when it had what I thought was a typical random freeze. I go to turn it back on and all it says is “Not enough space for music DB. Please free 30MB.” Strange, because I’m sure I had at least 700MB free and not to mention the fact that I was just using it for a few hours.
Having a Vista CPU handy I plug it in and it isn’t being recognized properly. The drive only shows up after 15 minutes of freezing Vista - then freezes my CPU when I try to click on it. I tried setting it to hold and pressing the center button when connecting and that didn’t do anything. I can’t do a soft reset since the player shuts off immediately after the “Not enough space for music DB” message.
Just got done trying it out on the XP machine - and it takes about 5 minutes to show as a drive. Click on in and after 10-20 minutes I get this message - “G:/ is not accessible. The semaphone timeout period has expired.”
Is it time to RMA it? This unit does have a 1 year warranty right? Thanks in advance for any help.
Before you proceed with the RMA try to do this because you might receive the same issue wiht the replacement;
First format the device by deleting all the songs and make sure you have the backup of all the songs in your computer;
you can format using the device itself by going to the settings and under settings select format and click yes or you can format it on your computer by going to “Computer” and right click the device and choose the option format, and after all the songs were deleted try to update the firmware by going to this link;
http://kb.sandisk.com/app/answers/detail/a\_id/300/kw/Sansa%20clip%20firmware%20updater/r\_id/101834
After updating the firmware try to reload the songs by batch and put it on folder probably 20 songs in a folder then transfer it to the player and try to observe.
Hope this works. 
Thanks for the reply. I can’t access the files at all. When I try to turn the Clip on I get the message about needing to free up space and then it shuts itself off…I can’t access the interface at all. When I try to access it from an XP CPU and a Vista CPU it just hangs both computers up and I sometimes get error messages like “G:\ is not accessible. The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error” in Vista - and the above mentioned ‘semaphore’ error on XP.
Message Edited by badlieu on 08-12-2009 12:25 PM
If you are getting the error “Not enough space for Music DB”, do a search for other threads that discuss this error for solutions.
I was never able to get the Clip to connect to my XP machine. After a few dozen attempts on my Vista machine with lock ups ranging from 10-40 minutes at a time trying to access the Clip - I was able to do a Quick Format and restore my Clip back to normal. Strange, I wonder what happened.
