[Ifp-driver-common] Re: formatting a UMS iRiver for use on linux

[Javier M. <li...@ma...>]

* Michael Speth <ms...@cl...> [040214 04:53]:

>> The best way I found to have an acceptable MBR on the iRiver player,
>> without those silly four primary partitions which windows creates, out
>> of which only one is usable (/dev/sda4 on linux), is to simply do a
>> 'fdisk /dev/sda', supposing that's where you have your iriver --it might
>> be /dev/sd{b,c,d,e,...} depending on whether you have other scsi devices
>> on the system (yeah, the iriver is not scsi but usb, what happens is
>> that usb-storage, which the iriver uses, is implemented over the scsi
>> layer-- ... err, sorry for the length of the message.

>> From the fdisk prompt just remove all the partitions, leaving the iriver
>> completely unpartitioned, save the changes and instead of creating the
>> filesystem wih mkfs.vfat or using windows, simply unplug the unit from
>> the usb port and turn it on. Supposing you already had the UMS firmware
>> installed, a message will show up on the screen explaining that the unit
>> is being formatted.

>Well, I did this but for some reason all my mp3's are still on my mp3 player.
>The strange thing is that the sda1-4 are gone and only sda remains.  It still
>reads 110M.  

If you say that after removinf all the partitions with fdisk the data is
still on the unit, somehow it was not formatted. The only way to make
sure ALL the date is completely erased is 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda
bs=1024', without the unit being mounted.

Keep in mind that this will take a hell of a time; well, maybe not that
much for 128Mb, but you sure can take a nap with a 1Gb unit (I did...)
So you'll need some patience.

Do that after you make sure there are no partitions on it ('fdisk -l
/dev/sda' doesn't list any sda1,sda2,...)

There is no way the data remanis after doing this. If the unit is not
malfunctioning, that is.

>Thanks for all the help thus far man!!!!

No prob mate :) Just as one benefits from others' experience and work on
all the OS projects out there, it's a pleasure to be of help to someone
else when you can :)


-- 
Javier Marcet <ja...@ma...>