I'm reposting this because a number of people have found the instructions for fixing the mobiBLU cube useful -- especially in light of the fact that the mobiBLU website is useless. I want to extract just the cube stuff out of the original post, and hopefully this post will get the Google juice of the original so that people can rehabilitate their formerly bricked players. Certainly, Hyun Won doesn't seem that concerned about it but I am, fellow netizens.

----- My MobiBLU cube MP3 player has been acting up, failing to start with the buttons and requiring hard resets with a paper clip. I decided to update the firmware. The updater only runs on Windows, so I fired up my one Windows box and downloaded and installed the firmware updater. When I ran it, it hang for minutes looking for the device (which was already mounted as a lettered drive and which I could see via the file system.) The instructions say that if that happens, you hold down the play button, press the reset button with a paperclip for 5 seconds, release the reset but keep the play button depressed until you get a recovery screen. Wow. I did all that, a thing popped up on Windows saying that the "USB Recovery Device has been installed, reboot to make it active." Dear god, what a pain but I did it. When I rebooted, nothing ever happened again. The installer looks for the device forever, the reset never again prompts any response, nothing every happens.

I'm about this close to throwing this piece of crap out the window. I strongly recommend against anyone buying the MobiBLU. It's cute and tiny, but is a pain to use on its best day and eventually eats itself. There are a few rampant iPod haters on here (and it is only a matter of time before the exact same anti-iPod rant gets commented on this post as I've received one dozen times already) but my Shuffle was fun to use and caused me zero problems up until the day it failed catasrophically and stopped mounting on the computer. The mobiBLU was never fun to use and caused ongoing problems for a long time. I'm half tempted to pull the Shuffle out of the drawer and see if it magically works now. If the mobiBLU can't be updated and continues to act finicky, I'm thinking about going for the slap cheapest MP3 play that takes SD cards as its media.

Thus far today, I'm pretty sick and tired of things that Just Don't Work.

Update: I installed the mobiBLU updater on my wife's computer, followed the instructions to the letter. When I did the reset and it entered recovery mode, I pressed "Update", then the program bombed out with a "semaphore time out period expired" error message. Now the device is completely dead, won't mount or turn on or anything. I guess that's that, end of the line with this device. I strongly recommend that people avoid this manufacturer.

----- Here is what commentor Jared posted that allowed me to fix my Cube. -----

I had the same problem Dave had, and I figured out how to fix it, since I couldn’t find anything on it.

Here’s how to fix that “semaphore” problem.

If you’re getting this error, install the CD software that came with the DAH-1500i, that’ll install the firmware that was defaultly on the product (100.100.105), when installing that, a popup comes up that says “the Recovery file is newer than what you’re installing, would you like to keep the newer one, click NO, so everything’s back to where it was. So, continue with that. Now, make sure it’s working properly, and that it turns on and mounts, and has allocated memory. Now, install the 100.100.122 firmware setup. This’ll overwrite that file you said “No” to. Reboot. Now trying installing the x.x.122 firmware, the way you were trying and it should work. It’ll read

Current firmware: 000.000.000 Firmware Upgrade: 100.100.122

Hit start! If you see “Allocating table”, that’s a good sign!

Then you’re good to go!

----- Thanks Jared. Anyone who has had the same problem with this thing, hope this fixed it.