User Feedback :: usb floppy & mp3 player doesn't work



I dug up an old laptop running Win98 and used fdisk to repartition the mp3player, and then format. (Well, that's the only way I know how to do it)

Finally I got the mp3 player working!!!

Now I get the following results:


dsl@box:~$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 2046 MB, 2046648832 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 248 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 247 1983996 b Win95 FAT32



And out of curiousity I tried this as well:


dsl@box:~$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda1

Disk /dev/sda1: 2031 MB, 2031611904 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 246 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1p1 ? 119512 153402 272218546+ 20 Unknown
Partition 1 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
phys=(356, 97, 46) logical=(119511, 107, 3)
Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings:
phys=(357, 116, 40) logical=(153401, 15, 41)
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda1p2 ? 82801 116350 269488144 6b Unknown
Partition 2 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
phys=(288, 110, 57) logical=(82800, 34, 61)
Partition 2 has different physical/logical endings:
phys=(269, 101, 57) logical=(116349, 219, 8)
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda1p3 ? 33551 120595 699181456 53 Unknown
Partition 3 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
phys=(345, 32, 19) logical=(33550, 137, 11)
Partition 3 has different physical/logical endings:
phys=(324, 77, 19) logical=(120594, 153, 54)
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda1p4 * 86812 86813 10668+ 49 Unknown
Partition 4 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
phys=(87, 1, 0) logical=(86811, 142, 3)
Partition 4 has different physical/logical endings:
phys=(335, 78, 2) logical=(86812, 225, 45)
Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary.

Partition table entries are not in disk order
dsl@box:~$

I don't understand what the partitions 1-4 are about, but the mp3 player is working now! It appears as one partition in the menu and I can mount and use it.


Update:

I tried something extra.
I wiped out the first 10000 sectors of memory of the mp3 player, filled that with zero. So all MBR, partition table, file table should have been gone. Then I formatted the mp3player again using winxp. The mp3player acted quite normally, with one partition. But when I used secinspect to view the status, indeed 4 partitions were shown!!! So winxp formatted the mp3player with 4 partitions but explorer showed only 1. That is so strange.  

I also started with a fresh installation of Win98. Did the same thing. The player worked quite normally with win98 as if it had 1 partition. Then I used fdisk to check. fdisk failed to work. Then I tried it with DSL, 4 partitions popped up!!!
I guess I can live without the usb floppy drive, but I actually found a way to make it work!

If I plug in just the floppy drive, 4 partitions come up in the mount menu. None of them is mount-able or usable. This is very weird because how could my floppy disk have 4 partitions??? (I tried with a floppy disk I'm sure is virus free, a good old dos installation diskette, so it's not because of the floppy disk itself.)

But, if I plug in my flash memory stick and mount that first, then plug in the usb floppy, now only one device, sdb, comes up in the menu and I can mount it and use it! So problem solved... sort of...
I meant partition & format under Linux. That Win behavior is due to it not recognizing multiple partitions on flash devices.

Use "sudo cfdisk /dev/sda", it's very easy to use :)
I tried using linux this time. It also worked.

This is what I did:

sudo cfdisk -z /dev/sda  (I picked 06 FAT16 for file type)  # for partition
sudo mkdosfs -F 16 /dev/sda1  # for creating file table

Then I tried to mount:
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1
mounting successful, but I didn't have access permission to sda1!!!???

So I rebooted. This time the mp3player was auto-detected as sda1. I mounted
it from the menu and it worked.

I think there's definitely something peculiar about this mp3player. I tried the above with FAT32. That didn't work. The mp3player wouldn't load on poweron. Then I tried using FAT32(LBA). Wow! The most incredible thing happened. It seemed to work at first sight. But then the mp3player did not show the files written by the computer. And the computer did not show the files recorded by the mp3player. so there're like two seperate file systems co-existing, and they didn't notice each other.

I also notice the mp3player seem to be loading slower than before, after meddling with its file system. It used to poweron instantly. now it takes 8 seconds for the first logo to appear, so slow I thought it died on me. It seems like nothing I do can reverse the slowness now.
You didn't have access to the device because you mounted it as root (sudo). The hotplug script assigns rw to user, so it would be root's to rw.

What kind of mp3 player is it (brand)? Some of them are kind of quirky and have their own on-board formatting tools.
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