Ipod 5g HDD Issue

[kxbx]

I've been running stable iPod builds for a few years now and I really like the project. However, today when connecting the player to my laptop I couldn't access it as an external drive. The player is recognised as a FAT32 formatted drive but I'm told the File Allocation Table is missing or corrupt. If I use the player on it's own I can see my data but not access it. Browsing through directories is also much slower than usual.

Is there any way to rebuild or repair the file system? I haven't managed to find any software capable of this when using an external drive.
Thanks in advance.

[bluebrother]

On Windows use chkdsk /f from the command line. On Linux use fsck.vfat

[kxbx]

I have tried that, got the following message (using chkdsk /f)

The type of the file system is FAT32.
An error occurred while reading the file allocation table (FAT 1).
An error occurred while reading the file allocation table (FAT 2).
There are no readable file allocation tables (FAT).

This is counter-intuitive as I would've thought that chkdsk would need to read an allocation table to recognise the file system but it might just be IDing it based on a magic number and then encountering a corrupt FAT (??)

Any help is much appreciated.
Post Merge: June 08, 2011, 02:52:48 PMI just noticed I can still access the Rockbox debug menu and view the partition information from there, if that is any use.
Post Merge: June 08, 2011, 03:03:44 PManother odd discovery - if I wait a minute or so after trying to load music it will successfully open and play the file, and even seamlessly load any following files in the same directory.
Post Merge: June 08, 2011, 03:57:59 PMOk, it seems I have solved this. I used TestDisk (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk) to repair the partition table and file allocation tables, I can access the drive through Windows again. RockBoxUtility refuses to install because of an unrecognised partition table so I will probably back up, reformat the iPod and re-install the correct partition table. Happy to have my data safe.

I can't be sure but I think the corrupted tables were due to the battery dying as I was trying to turn on the player, this is pure speculation however.

Thanks for your help, hopefully this might be useful to someone else.