Newer Zenstone MP3 Players and Linux; Go Cautiously.

[Martin McCormick]

	Just yesterday, we got a new 2-gig Zenstone mp3 player.
I was expecting to routinely plug it in to the USB port on my
Debian system and load it with tunes.

	Not so fast.

	The mount command crashed and burned with
"FAT: bogus sectors-per-track value"

	I then tried fdisk -l and the drive in question reports


Disk /dev/sda: 2008 MB, 2008547328 bytes
1 heads, 62 sectors/track, 63273 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 62 * 512 = 31744 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1       63274     1961471+   b  W95 FAT32
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.

	I did an image dump of that device and it appears to be
some form of fat32 file system that may be related to Windows
XP.

	Using strings on the image showed

NXP
)xV4
ZEN STONE  FAT32
RRaA
rrAa
NXP
)xV4
ZEN STONE  FAT32
RRaA
rrAa
ZEN STONE

	Some of this is just text garbage produced when strings
sees binary data that are in the range of ASCII characters, but 
it is pretty obvious that Linux can not mount this file system
at all.

	Older Zenstones seem to have been formatted with a
normal FAT32 file systems. A dump of the first few sectors from
a 1-gigabyte Zenstone looks like

MSWIN4.1
FAT32   
RRaA
rrAa
MSWIN4.1
FAT32   
RRaA
rrAa
ZEN Stone

	I am running the Debian 2.6.5 kernel and have no trouble
loading FAT32 file systems such as one often finds on USB thumb
drives.

	Since the format of the Zenstone is not really related
to music, we may be about to get nasty surprises when we try to
access flash drives that we can't just reformat.

	If anybody has any suggestions as to how to access this
new player, I would love to hear about it.

	Zenstones have been pretty accessible up to now, but
that doesn't seem to be the case any more.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Network Operations Group