H140

[nalrod]

Hello friends and well-wishers, I'm the lucky owner of an Iriver H140. I've recently added Rockbox to my player. One thing I have been puzzled with however is how to reformat my player to have 40gigs again. The player became unreadable a while back and I formatted it to FAT32, but WinXP can only format FAT32 up to 32gigs. So I have an Iriver with 32gigs instead of 40... I even tried using PartitionMagic to format to 40G, but it I was unsuccesful. I can't remember the error it gave off the top of my head because it was a while ago. I ended up using WinXP to format it. I don't know if there is disk damage and if there is, if there is anything I can do to fix it. Since I've installed Rockbox, i've been waiting for it to finish 'initializing database'. It's been over an hour. I'm wondering if this has anything to do with my 32gig format problem. Anyway that's about all the info I've got. Any help is appreciated. thanks... nalrod

[GodEater]

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/download/fat32format.zip

[nalrod]

Thanks for the tool. I tried it once with the old hard drive size of 32GB. But I didn't have any luck. got a "...failed to write" message. So I formated the whole thing (luckily my music is backed up on my computers) and reset the H140. I used PartitionMagic again to reformat the iriver so that all 40GB would be in one partition. But i could only do it in NTFS. But once I got it all in one partition (drive 'e') I couldn't format it all to FAT32. Can fat32format convert a NTFS drive to FAT32? Here's where I stand...


fat32format e:\
Warning ALL data on drive 'e' will be lost irretrievably, are you sure
(y/n) :y
Size : 39GB 78107967 sectors
512 Bytes Per Sector, Cluster size 32768 bytes
Volume ID is 16ff:2f55
32 Reserved Sectors, 9533 Sectors per FAT, 2 fats
1220138 Total clusters
1220137 Free Clusters
Formatting drive e:...
Clearing out 19162 sectors for Reserved sectors, fats and root cluster...
Failed to write


drat,
nalrod

[GodEater]

That's a little irritating

It's the only windows tool I know of that will write a greater than 32GB FAT32 file system though.

What caused the problem before that made you reformat in the first place? Is it possible there are bad sectors on the drive or something ?

[nalrod]

It's possible, if not, likely that there are. I'm not sure though, because chkdsk and norton disk doctor both give errors when trying to read it. I'm in the process of re-re-formatting it to FAT32 at 32gigs. At least I might be able to use it again. As I stand now, I might be in market for a new mp3 player.    My thoughts were that I might be able to create two partitions accounting for all the memory and format/check them independently to see what kind of problem i'm looking at. If chkdsk can actually fix the problems and there are two healthy FAT32 partitions on my iriver, maybe I can merge them into one, then format the whole thing with fat32format. However all this tinkering and fiddling may have done irrepairable damage; if it did have some problems, my attempt at meddling may have just done it in. But i'm still hopeful. I'm gonna wait until tomorrow, when it's done formating a 32GB and 7G partition on the iriver, and see if I can't get it to work. If not, do you have any advice on a totally awesome mp3 player for a reasonable price? (I don't know if that last question is cool to ask, so if it's not I apologize in advance...) thanks...

nalrod

[nls]

This http://www.compuapps.com/download/Swissknife/swissknife.htm program has been recommended for formating disks larger than 32 GB to FAT32 many times, never tried it myself though. If that fails, the iriver firmware supposedly has a format function that will reformat the disk for you.

[nalrod]

Also tried Swissknife before i got PartitionMagic. Same thing... i got errors when i tried to format. I tried using the format function that came with the iriver firmware, but it errored as well. I thought maybe because I had already formated with WinXP from 40 to 32gigs. I don't know if this would have thrown the firmware program off. Maybe my drive is worse off than I thought. But, again, I don't know.  

--nalrod

[LambdaCalculus]

Try GParted; you can download it as a CD image and boot your PC from it.

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

I've used this to format my girlfriend's iriver to FAT32 when she first got it, plus my Archos JBR. It worked perfectly both times for me.

[GodEater]

Also tried Swissknife before i got PartitionMagic. Same thing... i got errors when i tried to format. I tried using the format function that came with the iriver firmware, but it errored as well. I thought maybe because I had already formated with WinXP from 40 to 32gigs. I don't know if this would have thrown the firmware program off. Maybe my drive is worse off than I thought. But, again, I don't know.  

--nalrod

If pretty much every tool you're throwing at it is giving you the same problems - then I'm guessing the harddrive is failing.

For god's sake don't get rid of the player though - just get a replacement harddrive. No need to throw the baby out with the bathwater!

[bluebrother]

For god's sake don't get rid of the player though - just get a replacement harddrive. No need to throw the baby out with the bathwater!

... and a "nice" way to get rid of the player (if you really want to get rid of it) is to donate it to the project

[Multiplex]

Why not use the FOrmat in the iRiver firmware ?

Sorry - I only have H120 and H320 so may be asking a stupid question (again)

[Febs]

I tried using the format function that came with the iriver firmware, but it errored as well.

[Multiplex]

And I thought I'd thouroughly read every one of the previous posts... Sorry

And even more embarassingly, at work it's usually me doing to other folks what you just (rightly) did to me :-(

[Mikerman]

I just ran SwissKnife v3 last evening to format a 60gb drive on an iHP-140, without  any problem--and so SwissKnife would not seem to be the problem.

[nalrod]

I may indeed retry swissknife. but where i'm at now is that there is some damage to the harddrive. I used Windows Disk Manager to format the h140 to two different partitions one is 32gig and the other 7gig, i can now at least access the drive again. But the iriver only sees the main partition. so that 7gig partition doesn't show up. Anything I put in there is just for storage I presume. I've run chkdsk on the main partition and here's a little taste of what i'm getting back...

C:\>Chkdsk E:\ /F /V /R /X
The type of the file system is FAT32.
Volume H140 created 9/22/2007 8:18 AM
Volume Serial Number is 90AA-F0FD
Windows is verifying files and folders...
0 percent completed.
\RECORD
\FOUND.000
\FOUND.000\FILE0000.CHK
\FOUND.000\FILE0001.CHK
The \FOUND.000\FILE0001.CHK entry contains a nonvalid link.
Windows replaced bad clusters in file \FOUND.000\FILE0001.CHK
of name (null).
\FOUND.000\FILE0002.CHK
The \FOUND.000\FILE0002.CHK entry contains a nonvalid link.
Windows replaced bad clusters in file \FOUND.000\FILE0002.CHK
of name (null).
\FOUND.000\FILE0003.CHK
The \FOUND.000\FILE0003.CHK entry contains a nonvalid link.
Windows replaced bad clusters in file \FOUND.000\FILE0003.CHK
of name (null).
\FOUND.000\FILE0004.CHK
\FOUND.000\FILE0005.CHK
The \FOUND.000\FILE0005.CHK entry contains a nonvalid link.
Windows replaced bad clusters in file \FOUND.000\FILE0005.CHK
of name (null).
 ...and it goes on like that.   The windows disk manager diagnoses the drive as 'healthy' and I can copy data to it, but it's obviously got some problems. Maybe i can run swiss knife to get the partitions merged, or maybe i'm just back to where i was (with a 32gig drive). But the original purpose for all of this was because when i first installed Rockbox, the Database initialization hadn't stopped in over 3 hours... so i figured something was up with the drive setting/configuration. Any insight would be most helpful. Until then i'm gonna fumble around in the dark somemore.   -n