Reviving mp3 players

I’ve used my iAudio mp3-player for several years now. And by that I mean I have had it with me sleeping, working, cooking, biking to work, canoeing – in short almost every activity that doesn’t include me being covered in water.

So when my precious started acting up by shutting down. starting. shutting down. starting and so on for minutes, even hours at end I figured it was time to part ways.

My guess was that something in the contact surface of the Play/On button was bad (that’s a technical phrase for ‘oxidization causing inexplicable behaviour’). My choice was – as I saw it – either get a new player; admittedly tempting, or perform open heart surgery; as in spraying some expensive conductor spray on some surface. My financial situation is much better than my hardware skills, so indeed, getting a new player was topping the list.

Seconds before clicking the “buy” button I realized that it was quite some time since I reformatted the drive on the player. There shouldn’t really be any need to do that, except for me having … ehrm… unplugged it while it was still writing. Even – I shamefully admit – unplugged it while it was defragmenting (we all defrag our mp3-players, right?). Maybe there were some bad sectors or FAT entries that created all these problems?

Said and done, I copied most everything except the sound bits to my local harddrive, right-clicked the player-node in windows explorer and selected “Format”.

From here, I simply selected the default options and clicked Start.

After copying back the sync stuff, I asked my player to rsync itself and since then it’s worked just fine. I just wish I’d done a chkdsk first to have some evidence that was the actual problem. The mere fact that things work fine now doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an effect of my cause. But in this case I do think so.

–Jesper Högström