Help me get my SanDisk mp3 player working again.

September 29, 2006 9:24 AM

I have a new SanDisk Sansa m230 512MB. I had it loaded up and plugged into my Thinkpad T23 (with Ubuntu Dapper on it). I accidentally unplugged it while it was ejecting, and when I next tried plugging it in, the unit was read-only.

I tried erasing everything to reset the unit, but there's still one problem. There's a hidden folder called .Trash-holden that has all these weird characters on it and I can't erase the folder or the files therein. I have a call into SanDisk support, but...you know. Any thoughts about how I can restore my unit to the factory settings and fully erase the Trash folders?

posted by sholdens12 to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Wouldn't re-formatting the stick remove the .Trash folder?
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 10:30 AM on September 29, 2006

Your problem is that the filesystem on the Sandisk is corrupt. That makes the assumptions underlying file erasure invalid. You need to remove and rebuild the actual filesystem. Fiddling about with files inside a corrupted filesystem will generally not fix the corruption.

Use Ubuntu's Disks Manager (System->Administration->Disks) and reformat it.
posted by flabdablet at 12:00 PM on September 29, 2006

Ubuntu's Disk Manager won't let me reformat the disk. Is there another way to reformat? From the Terminal?
posted by sholdens12 at 12:13 PM on September 29, 2006

Do you have access to a Mac or Windows workstation? You can format FAT32 on these platforms.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 12:27 PM on September 29, 2006

Linux/most other Unices will not mount a filesystem read/write if it wasn't previously unmounted cleanly. so, since you just yanked without unmounting, that's probably the reason why you can't get the thing to work. run a dmesg after you plug the drive in next - you'll probably see some error messages about it. you can use the fsck utility to repair the damage (or scandisk on a windows computer if you have access to one) and then Linux should be OK with the drive.

otherwise, you probably can't reformat because the filesystem is mounted (albeit read-only). unmount it and then try reformatting. if the Disk Manager dealie doesn't work you can (very carefully) try using newfs or mkfs. (which one depends on your distro, and I don't use Ubuntu so I can't tell you. the utility itself should be in /sbin. you'll need to be root.) be careful you run it on the right device - it's pretty easy to accidently try to newfs your root partition or whathaveyou.
posted by mrg at 12:34 PM on September 29, 2006

I ended up formatting it on my wife's G5 Mac. Thanks for your help.
posted by sholdens12 at 7:15 PM on September 29, 2006

Future reference for other Ubuntu Dapper users who find this thread: if the Ubuntu Disk Manager's "Format" button is dimmed out, and there's another button called "Disable" that isn't dimmed out, click that one first and the "Format" button will become available. Unlike Windows, Ubuntu isn't happy to reformat a drive that's in active use.

For people more familiar with Unix command line tools: the Disable button is umount, Enable is mount, and the Format button runs mkfs.
posted by flabdablet at 11:04 PM on September 29, 2006