Gigabeat F20 system error 00000003

[cod.almighty]

Hi there, have been having some problems with my ageing player for a while. At first rockbox would freeze up and I would have to turn the battery off and on. I then received system error 00000001. I read this was due to the head sticking in the hdd and tapping the player should sort it. This worked for a while but started happening more and more frequently. After opening it up I noticed the hdd cable wasn't seated properly. After reseating the cable rockbox worked fine for a while. Then after rockbox locked up again, I rebooted my gigabeat and got the 00000003 error. The player is still detected by my comp (ubuntu 9.04). I've created a new dos partition table and formatted the drive with FAT32 using mkfs.vfat, copied the dummy firmware files over and manually installed rockbox. Unfortunately I'm still seeing the same error.

 I'm expecting to be told this is a hdd fault and it needs replaced but hope this isn't the case. It does still work as a USB drive, but I miss playing Zelda on rockboy.
 Any and all help/ideas/suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

P.S. I have searched the forum and google for info but didn't find much (maybe my google skills are slipping!?)

Quick edit: read back over the other posts relating to this error and this thread: http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=19740.msg140552#msg140552 , seems to suggest it may be the method I'm using to format the drive that's the problem. I have tried gparted with no joy but think this relies on mkfs.vfat for formatting FAT32. Is there a preferred method for formatting the HDD to FAT32 from Linux? or any other prog's I should try?