How to format an mp3 player in linux

Question

I have a cheap 2Gig mp3 player. It works well with a windows filesystem, but in linux there must be some tricks I'm overlooking. The format is generally good with the following options:

mkfs.vfat -I -F 32 -n "Mp3" /dev/sdb

(yep it has no partition table, it is used in "big floppy" mode). My only problem is that I can not browse the root directory on-device.

Linux sees the filesystem and I can copy files, create dirs, play them, but the device sees garbage folders in the root directory (totally random characters) containing more random dirs and so on.

What I think the problem is that mkfs creates a very short root directory entry, and the firmware on-device expects that the following sectors also contain directory entries, when in fact they contain garbage. Is there any additional option to mkfs.vfat to make it more dos-like?

Answer 1

You should use FAT16 filesystem instead of FAT32. You can also use either a partition or the whole device, it doesn't matter. I had the same issue, and in my case I formated my mp3player with the following command:

root:~# mkdosfs -n IAUDIO -F16 -f2 -v /dev/sdb1
mkdosfs 3.0.16 (01 Mar 2013)
/dev/sdb1 has 65 heads and 62 sectors per track,
logical sector size is 2048,
using 0xf8 media descriptor, with 1024640 sectors;
file system has 2 16-bit FATs and 16 sectors per cluster.
FAT size is 64 sectors, and provides 64030 clusters.
There are 16 reserved sectors.
Root directory contains 1024 slots and uses 16 sectors.
Volume ID is 1034e7d3, volume label IAUDIO     .

And now it works as it should.