Trying to Mount New 2-Gig Zenstone MP3 Player

The original 1-gig Zenstone MP3 players mount on Debian
just fine if one has vfat support so I expected it to be a
breeze to load a brand new 2-gig model, not the Zenstone Plus,
but the 2-gigabyte model that has the tiny speaker.

Boy, was I wrong about the ease factor.

There is some weird variant of the fat32 FS on this drive
and I haven't been able to mount it to save my soul.

$ fdisk -l

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.

It gets better.

# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

"FAT: bogus sectors-per-track value"

Nothing mounts. Game over.

I did capture an image of the flash drive.

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/tmp/image.bin bs=512

Doing the strings utility on the first few bytes of image.bin
yields

NXP
)xV4
ZEN STONE FAT32
RRaA
rrAa
NXP
)xV4
ZEN STONE FAT32
RRaA
rrAa
ZEN STONE
RANSF~1RAT

An older working Zenstone's beginning sectors look like

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

Is there any way to make this odd-ball fat32 mount?

If that XP really means Windows XP and not just garbage that
strings picked up, then that may explain things a bit.

Is there something I need to upgrade?

I am running a 2.6.5 kernel with support for most of the
common Microsoft file systems but we are dead in the water on
this little project, so far.

Thanks for any constructive ideas.

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


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Relevant Pages

  • Re: Trying to Mount New 2-Gig Zenstone MP3 Player
    ... and I haven't been able to mount it to save my soul. ... ZEN STONE FAT32 ... To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-REQUEST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ...
    (Debian-User)
  • Re: Any idea why this wont mount?
    ... Assuming the partitions are correct, and that the mount points exist, do ... you have vfat support in the kernel? ... Try mounting the partitions manually ...
    (alt.os.linux)
  • Re: Any idea why this wont mount?
    ... > you have vfat support in the kernel? ... Try mounting the partitions manually ... Yes...and they mount fine with: ...
    (alt.os.linux)