Database malfunctioning on iPod mini 1st gen

[Fallingwater]

I dug out of a drawer my old iPod mini and decided to give it an update and use it in the car. I should mention that at this time it had an old version of Rockbox that worked just fine.

I decided I'd update it, so I downloaded the utility, wiped the old Rockbox and installed the stable release. It boots and works off file mode, but the database has obvious problems. Several times when selecting "database" in the main menu it said "building database (1546 found)" and stayed there indefinitely. After a few reboots and database updates it would fix itself. Then it started showing a blank screen when I selected the database in the menu. This would not go away with either rebooting, resetting or reinitializing the database.

At this point I decided I'd try the dev build in the hope it'd work better. Now the database seemed to be working, but only ever loaded 40 or so of the thousand-and-then-some Ogg files on it.

I wiped the whole thing via an iTunes restore, then put stable back on it and reuploaded the music. It initialized the database and promptly showed a blank screen. I installed the dev and this kinda-sorta works, but often locks up - if I select a song it might say "5 found - press play/pause to abort" and stay there, and pressing play does nothing.

What's wrong with it?

[Fallingwater]

A small update for anyone having similar issues: I decided to remove the problem at the root, so I fired up Tag&Rename and had it rename all files with the following tree structure:

Artist
->Album
-->##-TrackTitle

(If you use Tag&Rename or a program working with the same tagging system, the string to get that file tree is %1\%3\%6-%2)

I then removed ALL the tags (this part is important), stuck all the files in a "music" subfolder and access them using the file browser instead of the database. If I want to do random-all I long-press on the "music" subfolder and select to add to the current playlist, then play it on shuffle.

This works great for selecting specific music as long as you're happy doing it by artist-album (and don't care about browsing by the other fields Database mode offers), and it's actually faster than database mode on shuffle-all.

Lastly, it might be that the fault for all this is Tag&Rename's - it's worked so far on other players, but otherwise I can't really explain it. I thought of retagging everything with another program, but as it's currently set Files mode works perfectly fine for my use, so I'm not looking forward to wasting more time on this problem.

Note that if your database is getting stuck on your tags, just using file mode isn't enough, as it'll try to load the tag anyway when the file is loaded. You do need to wipe the tags from all the files.

[Fallingwater]

Well, so much for that. I'm still getting instability. What usually happens is a panic or just a lockup. After resetting sometimes it works fine, other times it complains it can't find rockbox.ipod and requires several more resets. Sometimes it does it simply after turning it off.

Files mode is still better than database mode because it seems less crash-happy and when it does crash it doesn't need to rebuild the whole database, but it's clear something is still wrong. I even checked the microdrive by running a write-test with badblocks from Linux and it found no bad sectors. At this point I'm running out of ideas.