MP3 player is "full" but has no files on it...

[Ignazio Palmisano]

Laurent Asorne wrote:
> On Friday 03 August 2007 00:55:04 Bruce Marshall wrote:
>> On Thursday 02 August 2007, Laurent Asorne wrote:
>>> When I click on the icon of the MP3 Player in /media/, it already shows
>>> that its usage is 99% even before I make any transaction ... Doesn't that
>>> mean that the system has infos about this specific device in memory and
>>> that this memory only needs to be refreshed or deleted?
>> I have a Samsung YU-1 player and after a few months of putting files and
>> erasing files on it, it tends to have a flakey file system.   For example,
>> you put a book on it and when listening, it will run into a 'block' of an
>> older book that has been erased.
>>
>> So I reformat it using Windows and it's good for some more usage.
>>
>> You might try a format under Linux but I don't trust the Mass storage stuff
>> at this point.
> 
> I formatted it under Windows and now - oh wonder - it works fine! Thanks for 
> the idea! Now I KNOW why I should always keep one Windows computer at 
> hand... ;-)
> 
> Laurent Asorne
> 

I've had the same kind of problem on a MP3 player on different occasions 
(on Windows, Linux and Mac); I found out it is formatted FAT16, not 
FAT32, and while the space was reported correctly it seemed not to 
accept too many files in the root of the pen. Also, different names for 
trash folder in the different OSs left around quite a number of hidden 
folders on the pen. Don't know whether there were hidden files on your 
pen (too late to check :)), but by the way I formatted an external hard 
drive with FAT32 from Linux and it worked like a charm just last week 
(500 GB, Windows partitioning and formatting died horribly three times 
after an hour of trashing the drive - one hour per trial, I mean. The 
live cd on my windows box took longer to boot up than to format the 
disk, and it's been working reliably on all the operating systems).

This just to say that a windows machine can be useful, but not necessary 
for these tasks ;)
I.

-- 
Ignazio Palmisano
Ph.D. - ignazio at csc.liv.ac.uk