Turn player off.

Slide HOLD button to the locked position towards headphone jack.

Press and hold the RECORD button while connecting to the computer.

Release RECORD button once you see "Welcome to Recovery Mode" on the player's LCD.

 You are now connected to the computer in recovery mode. Open My Computer and you will see a new removable drive named 16MB-FORMAT.

DO NOT ATTEMPT TO FORMAT THE 16MB-FORMAT VOLUME!!

Open the 16MB-FORMAT drive and create a new folder in it named sansa.fmt.

Unplug the cable from the player. It should say "Formatting..." somewhere on the player's LCD screen, and then "Format complete." when done.

Here is what is happening. When the player detects you have disconnected from the computer it will check for a file or folder named sansa.fmt in its root directory. If it finds that file or folder it will format itself. You are telling the player to format itself. Do not try to do the format the player yourself via recovery mode because doing so will cause more problems that will be far more difficult to repair.