Semi bricked Force

My used Force was great for 3 days until after work today, it booted, gave me a warning about "Drive containing temporary file location has been removed, reverting to default". I press okay then I get "Warning, out of temporary space". I click okay and the touchscreen goes to the default 2 track project. The touchscreen works fine and using the swipe gestures, I can load a project and play it using the touchscreen and sound is fine.
Problem is, none of the button are lit including pads and rotaries. This means I cannot get in to the menu system to reset or check my internal storage usage.
If I use the MATRIX-LOAD-SAVE-POWER BUTTON combination when starting, the screen shows Update mode but my PC will not detect it, hence an update that way is a no go.
Trying to put a .img file on a USB stick doesn't work either. As it stands, I have one heck of an expensive paperweight sat next to my Machine Mikro.
As it stands just now, I'm waiting on Akai getting back to me with a repair centre in the UK that could help me (out of warranty) but I'm wondering if there is anything I can do in the meantime?
I was pondering if the internal 16gb card could be removed and checked to see if it's full and causing a hardware issue or if there is an option to reinstall the software using a PC?
Yesterday it was working fine as I was following along with a 1hr long YouTube video but this afternoon, unusable.

Ps. Hello, I'm Gaz and I'm new to the forum. I'm sorta hoping I'll be a long term Akai user but it seems I may well be stuck with Maschine and a laptop if I can't get this sorted.

Cheers folks.

Yes, the internal 16GB drive is just a microSD card and can even be replaced if need be, but it must be formatted and structured correctly. But you could just temporarily remove it and open it up on a computer. Maybe ask the wizards on the Force hacking group here:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1705169669660677

I've managed to instal Ubuntu as a virtual machine on my PC and have mounted the micro SD card from inside the Force.
It has 12.3kb of free space. I can't see that being a good thing.
I have an Expansions folder inside that and a Splice folder which seem to be holding most of the resources. The Expansions folder is not locked but even after deletion, the card still reports only 12.3kb free? Weird.
For some reason, I can't log on as a sudo su on the VM. I am defo not clued up on Ubuntu at all so my plan is to copy all the folders to a larger Ubuntu formstted microsd card and try to rename the card to the same name as the 16gb one.
I'm also wondering if I could just format a larger card in Ubuntu and create folders of the same name within and hope the Force accepts it rather than copy all content within the folder?

Sadly, I don't do Facebook but if it means sorting this out, I may have to create a temp account.

I think it's fair to assume your problem is due to your internal drive having no free space!

Yes you can just format a larger card and recreate the folder structure. I've seen posts previously that said any format is fine, I'd probably stick to ext4 or exfat.

I'm not a linux guru so not aware of how it handles deleted content, but fairly sure there is a hidden '.trashes' folder that needs to be emptied in order to free up all the deleted splice content. You should be able to empty this via terminal.

Here's a post where someone who swapped out the internal SD card, but I think you should be fine just by cleaning up the currently mounted SD card

viewtopic.php?p=1744702

I'm not going to open my Force just to test this, but it should be possible to copy/clone the entire contents of a smaller microsd card to a larger one, as a whole disk/partition image, and then resize the partition on the large card to fill up the whole space. I think the Raspbian Linux distro for the Raspberry Pi does exactly this. They distribute a small partition image of only a few gigabytes, people "flash" it on a 256 gig card or something, and on the first boot it resizes itself to use the whole card.

I managed to remove the samples from the Splice folder and also the files within the Expansions folder.
The Force booted up fine. All buttons, pads and pots worked and I managed to get in to Menu-Preferences and carry out a Preferences Reset.
Then the buttons froze again.
I've managed to replicate this and at one point, when I was in Browser, the Force suddenly lost all access to the internal drive.
At one point, I was also in the settings page for the pad settings and everything suddenly became greyed out.
I'm think now that this is a hardware issue.
I also now have two tickets running with InMusic regarding this. The second ticket is purely for them to supply me with a contact in the UK to try and have this repaired. I did ask for a number but they said they didn't have one so will open a ticket.
This is going to annoy me. I wish I studied electronics when I was a yoof

Internal SD could be corrupt. Also it doesn't like any of the factory folders disappearing completely, I think it is looking for them, you could try putting those folders back (not necessarily with any sample content inside).

Yeh I have tried that. I duplicated the folders and kept content the same apart from the Expansions and Splice folders which I emptied.
It'll be something really silly I'm sure but right now it's a totally unusable.
If I leave it for half an hour with the power lead out, the whole thing boots up with all buttons working, then it just crashes.

If you have it connected to a Linux machine, instead of file-copying, try making a full partition image dump, and copy that to a fresh card.

HouseWithoutMouse wrote:If you have it connected to a Linux machine, instead of file-copying, try making a full partition image dump, and copy that to a fresh card.

I'll give that a whirl

I can provide you with the content updater file from Akai I think this might help. Send me a message if you want it.