Sometimes, disaster strikes. Imagine you own a beautiful Sandisk Sansa mp3 player, you buy some extra accessoires for it, and then.... you accidentally drop it and it stops functioning. Hey, sure you do not want to buy something new, because you do not want to dump all your accessoires that you bought for it. And why buy something new if you might be able to repair it? Let's give it a try..... It IS worth it!

I found out that Sandisk Sansa players have a very weakly fastened bit of memory clicked onto the mainbord. This bit of memory could just be pulled out of its socket, when the Sansa player is dropped. I only needed to click the memory back to its spot to bring the player back to life. Hurray!

Symptom: when starting the Sansa, the blue dial-ring just gave a blue colour, but nothing else happened. It did not start, the screen appeared not to work, nor did it react to anything I did.

OK, here we go. On the backside of your player you will find four small screws, holding the back to the body. Remove these four screws.

Carefully lift off the back of the Sansa player, this is an easy job, although it is also secured using click-on-plastic.

Underneath you will find the battery, remove it. Easy job....

On the outer edges of the back, inside, you will find four even tinier screws. Remove these four screws.

Then, remove the frontpanel. This is quite stiffly clicked into place, so be careful not to damage these plastic holders. Take it easy, it might be helpful not to damage anything....

Then, by starting at the bottom, remove the interiour mainboard of the player, by pulling softly on the edge of the mainboard, while making a bit of room for the connector to pass the bodyshell. On the bottom side it is held into place by the main connector, on the top side by the headphone-connector. This one sticks out so far that I would advise you to start removing the mainboard from the bottom.

Once you got the mainboard out, you hopefully see the memory-board at the top, hanging loose. If so, you could be very lucky. Underneath you will find an elongated connector to the mainboard. Just click the memory back into place.

And then, sure, refitting is the reverse of removal. So, take it easy, and give it a try.... Good luck, I hope it helps. If it does, plaese let me know, I would like to hear from you. Am I the only one on the planet to whom this happened?