I got mail from a person called Roger Braunstein, but without a valid return address. How weird. Here is what he wrote:
I got an EMP-Z just a month or two ago, and it was acting fine until one day it started to stutter on some songs. I tried deleting those songs and re-copying them, but it was still a little jerky. Flustered, I did something stupid and formatted the little drive (i am using mac os x and i used the gui disk utility.) In retrospect, this was a terrible idea, but there you have it. I re-formatted it with a PC back into a FAT32 drive, but it still refuses to recognize when I copy the .sys firmware file to the drive, and has lost its functionality as an mp3 player entirely. (it still behaves normally as a storage device, of course except for the fact that it won’t recognize firmware files and update its firmware)
I thought about it, and the device probably has some boot sector which it scans for the firmware, and the behavior of updating the firmware when a proper file is placed on the disk is also probably encoded in the firmware.
The only strange issue during playback I’ve been having during the trip is that occasionally a slight shock such as the device bumping against my chest or me tapping it with my finger would “reset” it you hear a loud tick, playback stops, and when you press play again, it will restart at the same position and at the same volume level it restarted last time. The files, however, are unchanged.
The other issue I have when I put new files on the device is that it often seems to corrupt the filesystem. I don’t know what happens exactly. I mount the device, delete the old stuff, copy the new stuff, unmount the device, and try to play it: No go. When I then try to remount the device, it will tell me that the device is not a valid mass storage device. The only thing that has helped in these cases was mkfs.vfat – ie. format the device with the type VFAT.
VFAT is not the same as FAT32. VFAT or FAT is the old dos file system, FAT32 was introduced to cope with bigger hard drives at some point between win95 an win98. Maybe the OS of the EMP-Z does not support FAT32. In any case, I did this several times already, and never noticed any problem with the procedure. I have no idea about the firmware, however. Is there a system file on the device? When I look at the device, I don’t see any hidden files – I mount it as a VFAT device and use ordinary GNU tools – the midnight commander, ls, etc. Maybe his OS put the file on the MP3 player? Anyway, looks like a red herring to me.
#Gadgets