I recently acquired a 1Gig mp3 player. The Samsung Yepp C1Z (model is just YP C1Z). I love this thing, but I'm having a problem with loading stuff on it. Samsung does not offer any snazzy interface tools, so I'm simply connecting it as a USB storage device. (Samsung won't even tell me what disk format it uses, so I have to rely on the auto detect.)

After transferring a bunch of files, the copy halts, reporting that the device is out of space. Sure enough, df -H states that the available space is 0% (of 1.1G capacity). But if I do a du -H /mnt/usbdrive/* on the mounted drive, it shows only 430M of files. Nowhere near the 1G it would take to fill 'er up. In fact, when I turn the player on, the Yepp's startup screen agrees with this number, reporting 580M of free space.

So it seems pretty convincing that the mounted drive is somehow reporting the wrong available space, but I have no idea how to go about working around this. (For what it's worth, I'm running Ubuntu 5.04.)

Anybody else have a similar problem? Or can somebody suggest a way to dig further?

Jefficus

I have similar player, no problems. Mine has fat32 filesystem - a little under 1 GB. Try to mount it with -t vfat option.

I have the yp-c1x, same deal, only half the capacity. First thing i would try is formatting the drive. There's an option to do that in the menu i think. Next up would be a firmware update, if available

I have new info. I'm beginning to think the problem is CAUSED by the onboard formatter. I started with a player that showed 950 M free. I put as much content on it as I was able - about 400 Meg, at which point Linux refuses to put more on it, because it is now seeing it as a full device. reporting it as having 6 Meg free even though the onboard display shows 550 M free. So, in an attempt to fix things, I decided to do a reformat from the player's onboard interface.

Linux now shows that there are no files on the device, but is still reporting it as 6Meg free.

It would APPEAR that the onboard reformat does not update the available space that gets reported over the USB connection, even though its onboard records show a full 991 M free. Every time you reformat, you 'lose' however much memory was already occupied at the time of reformat.

There's probably a single memory location in the device that just needs to be set to zero. If only I knew which one, or how to do it...

It sure sounds as you have two partitions there ...
Can you run fdisk (or cfdisk) on it to see whats going on?

Great suggestion. It hadn't occurred to me that there might be multiple partitions on it. But it turns out that there is just the one, and it is a full gigabyte in size even though the mounted device still reports only 6M free. I'm completely flummoxed.

Well ... I do not know how you deleted those files, but perhaps there is something like trashcan, recycle bin or whatever it might be called. Run ls -a to see if something is hidden.

Have you tried formatting from a windows pc? Does the device work properly in windows?

Can you post the output from dmesg when you plug the player in?

Good idea!

File deletion is done by "rm -rf". When I ran an "ls -al" it confirmed that there is absolutely nothing on the drive.

Plugging the device in generates the following info in dmesg:

I don't know an awful lot about the inner workings of SCSI and USB, but that appears to be saying "A 1G writable drive was just plugged in."

As for Windows, I have not tried. I spent 10 years purging that commercial virus from my life and don't relish giving it a chance to creep back in, even if it might fix a problem. (I like to say that Linux will never get anywhere if we keep resorting to Windows when things get sticky, but that's just a way of defending my irrational hatred for all things MS.) However, I may cave on this position and try it at a friend's place if I haven't sorted it out through native Linux means soon.

Although my player is the 512MB version, when i plug it in the output from dmesg shows a partition on the player at sda1, which is where i mount it from. I have no idea if this makes a difference or not. I have heard that some flash devices are mounted from /dev/sda. Just an observation.. i'm pretty lost on this.

This is a mkdosfs app for linux that can format fat32.

fdisk /dev/sda -l will show whether there are partitions or not.