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

[Bruce Marshall]

On Friday 03 August 2007, Ignazio Palmisano wrote:
> 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.

That's another thing that should be mentioned about the Samsung MP3 
players....

I've found that it is best not to load my 1GB player with more than 700mb (or 
so) of stuff.  If I do, I am likely to find the directory missing on some 
items.  Apparently, the player sets aside so much space for filenames and 
when that runs out, you're not going to see what was added later.

Additionally,  too many filenames will cause the same problem.