Sansa e200 hacking

I’m travelling next week (Supercomputing06 in Tampa) so I figured it was time to break out my new MP3 player. Sansa e200 8GB. Of course the first thing to do is update the firmware and this is where I hit a brick wall. Back in the good old days you could go download the new firmware, and run some cheesy app that flashes your device. No problem. But the Sansa guys are rocket scientists, so they have a whole "Firmware Updater" app you download that checks your Sansa every time you plug it in and tells you when new firmware is available.

 

Ok that’s all nice and friendly in theory, the problem is their app doesn’t work. It does nothing on Vista. It does nothing on W2K3 Server x64. And those are the only machines I have at work now. After a little spelunking I discover that on Vista it installs two files (SansaSvr.exe and SansaUpdater.exe) and a service. On x64 it installs nothing. I figure their service is busted on Vista but at least I can have a shot at getting it to work on x64 if I get the files copied over. So I copy them over and try and run SansaUpdater.exe. Gives me a nice error that "Sansa Updater can only be launched by Sansa Service!" Thanks guys. So I install SansaSvr.exe as a service, start it and plug in my Sansa. Something happens, but no UI. A little spelunking shows that SansaSvr.exe has launched SansaUpdater.exe but there is no UI showing on my desktop. But now at least I can see that the magic command line switch is "SansaUpdater.exe -iloveit". Kill the service, run "SansaUpdater.exe -iloveit" and off it goes and now I can finally update my firmware!

 

So hats off to the Sansa firmware guys for making this the most complicated process imaginable. I hope the rest of my experience is a little smoother.