USB booting :: MP3 Mass Storage - Cheap Chips!

Thought I'd put this message up as it might help others.

I bought a cheap MP3 player with 500MB internal flash memory to run DSL on as it was cheaper than just a standard PenDrive.

In most cases the software used to play the MP3s is on a separate chip or a protected part of flash - I have formatted mine to various file system types and not had any problem.

However I believe that these large capacity and cheap drives use a number of (I think 4 for mine) separate smaller CF memory chips or blocks.

This may be a way of using up cheaper CF flash chips or getting around volume problems in manufacturing.

The MP3 player I have even has a menu item to fool the OS into thinking it is a single memory range instead of multi memory blocks. (Similar to a RAID perhaps?)

Now the problem:

Often I have found DSL won't boot from this drive and sometimes sees it as several drives all in one (thought it can't mount the other 'sudo-partitions'..).

I think what is happening is that some of the files or the knoppix file itself on the drive end up on a separate memory module or spanned over modules and this causes problems at boot.

It might be worth considering this problem before buying an MP3 player as opposed to a standard PenDrive.

Anyone know anything more about this?

cRunchy
Pete

original here.