vfat mp3 player corrupt files
 

I have a MP3 player, FAT filesystem so I mount it as vfat, I've used it under Windows no problem but a few weeks ago I copied a bunch of songs to it from linux since I no longer have windows installed and a bunch of files refused to play. This morning I was in a mad rush and I copied a few CDs onto it and left but when I went to play it not one file worked. I plug it into the computer and the files are there but won't play.

I'm using autofs to automagically mount it when I plug it in but I'm just unplugging it at the end, autofs unmounts it but with a FAT filesystem do I need to umount it before I unplug it? I'll have a play around but anyone have any ideas why the files end up corrupt?

Thanks :)

Okay a quick experiment seems to suggest that unmounting the filesystem properly before I unplug the device works. Any ideas on how I can make this more automatic, I can handle the mounting and unmounting fine but my roommates will probably want to use it and it'd be easier if I could get it to a plugin-copy-unplug procedure.


Thanks for any ideas :)

You can tell your roomates to "click here" when done copying files to complete the process. Have the "click here" be a command to umount the devce...

So it sounds like it's caching the files somewhere rather than actually copying them, then upon umount, completes the actual copy/move. Check the options for vfat to see if there is a cache option that you can turn on/off.

Cool