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MP3 player has no partitions

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cinelli
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MP3 player has no partitions

#334911

Postby cinelli » August 21st, 2020, 2:59 pm

I have a little MP3 player made by AGPTEK. It has been fine for a couple of years but has recently started to play up. I think of it as a glorified memory stick with extra facilities. As well as being a music and podcast player it is also an FM radio and sound recorder.

I am working in linux Mint and the player no longer mounts automatically. When I do mount it, it mounts as read only, which means I can no longer copy files to it. fdisk and df show

cinelli@asus-mint:~$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdc
Disk /dev/sdc: 7.72 GiB, 8273002496 bytes, 8079104 sectors
Disk model: HS USB FlashDisk
Units: sectors of 1 * 1024 = 1024 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 1024 bytes / 1024 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 1024 bytes / 1024 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sdc1 0 0 0 0B 0 Empty
cinelli@asus-mint:~$ df -h /dev/sdc
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdc 7.7G 3.2G 4.6G 42% /media/cinelli/AGPTEK-U3
cinelli@asus-mint:~$ touch /media/cinelli/AGPTEK-U3/t.t
touch: cannot touch '/media/cinelli/AGPTEK-U3/t.t': Read-only file system

The odd thing is that it has no partitions, unlike any other memory stick I have. So it mounts as /dev/sdc, not /dev/sdc1. Note the disk identifier is zero. I have never changed the partitioning and I wonder now how it has ever worked. Has anyone ever seen a device like this? I could reformat it but the question is, would this make it completely unusable? Thanks.

Cinelli

kyu66
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Re: MP3 player has no partitions

#334919

Postby kyu66 » August 21st, 2020, 3:31 pm

cinelli wrote:I have a little MP3 player made by AGPTEK. It has been fine for a couple of years but has recently started to play up. I think of it as a glorified memory stick with extra facilities. As well as being a music and podcast player it is also an FM radio and sound recorder.

I am working in linux Mint and the player no longer mounts automatically. When I do mount it, it mounts as read only, which means I can no longer copy files to it. fdisk and df show

cinelli@asus-mint:~$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdc
Disk /dev/sdc: 7.72 GiB, 8273002496 bytes, 8079104 sectors
Disk model: HS USB FlashDisk
Units: sectors of 1 * 1024 = 1024 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 1024 bytes / 1024 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 1024 bytes / 1024 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sdc1 0 0 0 0B 0 Empty
cinelli@asus-mint:~$ df -h /dev/sdc
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdc 7.7G 3.2G 4.6G 42% /media/cinelli/AGPTEK-U3
cinelli@asus-mint:~$ touch /media/cinelli/AGPTEK-U3/t.t
touch: cannot touch '/media/cinelli/AGPTEK-U3/t.t': Read-only file system

The odd thing is that it has no partitions, unlike any other memory stick I have. So it mounts as /dev/sdc, not /dev/sdc1. Note the disk identifier is zero. I have never changed the partitioning and I wonder now how it has ever worked. Has anyone ever seen a device like this? I could reformat it but the question is, would this make it completely unusable? Thanks.

Cinelli

Sorry, no idea why it no longer auto mounts - possibly a changed config setting in Mint, have you updated the OS recently?

As for not showing partitions, seems not that unusual for pre-formatted devices which have their own firmware, see https://askubuntu.com/questions/76197/m ... tion-table

Reformatting may well brick it, so I would investigate other avenues first, browse some Mint forums for clues e.g. https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=177518

kyu66

kyu66

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Re: MP3 player has no partitions

#334921

Postby Breelander » August 21st, 2020, 3:53 pm

cinelli wrote:I have a little MP3 player made by AGPTEK. It has been fine for a couple of years but has recently started to play up. I think of it as a glorified memory stick with extra facilities...

... When I do mount it, it mounts as read only...


When a USB memory stick starts to fail a common failure mode is that it first goes read-only. This is so that you have a chance to retrieve data before it fails completely.

The odd thing is that it has no partitions, unlike any other memory stick I have.... Has anyone ever seen a device like this?


Yes, this was normal for smaller USB sticks at one time, less so now that USBs are larger capacity. I have some 8GB Lexar USB sticks that were supplied pre-formatted by the manufacturer without using a partition table. Here's how to perform a partitionless format.

https://superuser.com/questions/1052723 ... partitions

I could reformat it but the question is, would this make it completely unusable?


If as I suspect it has gone into a 'fail-safe' read only mode, then you won't be able to format it either.

cinelli
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Re: MP3 player has no partitions

#334930

Postby cinelli » August 21st, 2020, 4:27 pm

Thank you for these tips. Yes, I am up to date. I am getting to grips with the new Mint 20 cinnamon. But I am also experimenting with the difference between mounting via the disks utility and by issuing the mount command. Inspecting the file /etc/mtab I notice an option "errors=remount-ro" which may explain why I am getting the read-only error. I won't reformat. That seems like asking for trouble.

Cinelli

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Re: MP3 player has no partitions

#336975

Postby montehampster » August 30th, 2020, 3:01 pm

Try installing gMTP which is in the Mint repository, open and then connect the MP3 player. I needed to do this to add files to my granddaughter's Kindle.

cinelli
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Re: MP3 player has no partitions

#337003

Postby cinelli » August 30th, 2020, 5:59 pm

montehampster wrote:Try installing gMTP which is in the Mint repository, open and then connect the MP3 player.


Thanks for that. I have made some recent progress - I found that listing the device's file gave some I/O errors. So I issued the command dosfsck -a /dev/sdc and this moved the corrupt files to a directory from where they could be copied elsewhere. This has solved the read-only problem. It still doesn't mount automatically but this is a small point.

But thank you for the gmtp utility. This is new to me.

Cinelli


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