Weird Problem: Recording over music!

[iaudio_brad]

Hey,

I've recently found while listening to some of my music that half way through a song in my collection it will change to one of my voice recordings (concerts mostly).

The tagging, etc. for the song which should be playing continues to be shown, but it's almost as if my music has been partially overwritten by old voice files.

Anyone else have this problem, know a solution, or have any inspiration/advice?

Thanks,

Brad

[GSV3MiaC]

The hard drive in the X5/M5 is just as subject to weird corruptions and crosslinking as any other FAT32 hard drive. Suggest you hook up to your PC and run a disk scan (chkdsk, scandisk, whatever), and be prepared to fix problems if there are any (start with a read only scan).

If the crosslinking is severe you may lose the contents of the files and folders concerned.

[breakfastchef]

When all else fails, reformat the hard drive and reload the data.

[GSV3MiaC]

Yes, but all else HASN'T failed, until you've tried a disc scan.

[breakfastchef]

Yes, but all else HASN'T failed, until you've tried a disc scan.

I am not discounting your input, I am just making a further suggestion.

[iaudio_brad]

Thanks for the advice!

So I ran both a simple and a complex disk check. This removed the 'glitching' in songs, but instead they would just randomly terminate where the glitch had been.

I ran an Mp3Test check and found I had like 200 some corrupted mp3s.

It won't be a big deal to change these files, but any ideas on how to avoid this in the future?

I am running a dualboot with Rockbox and the latest Cowon firmware on a 20gb X5 (Hd size shouldn't matter but yeah..)

Brad

[GSV3MiaC]

The MP3's terminate because fixing the cross-linked sectors means that some bits of the song are now visibly no longer there (that's the effect of crosslinking, when two files think they both own a disc cluster - obviously whoever wrote to it last has the real content on it - the other file(s) THOUGHT they had something there, but were just confused).

Crosslinking should only happen if the unit powers off unexpectedly - pulling the plug when a transfer is in progress (a WRITE) can cause it, so don't do that. Use 'safely disconnect', or make sure your PC is set to 'optimise for fast removal' rather than 'optimise for write speed'. It can be caused by hardware problems (bad disc, bad memory) too, but that's pretty rare.

Run a disc scan more often, to catch the problems, if any, before they snowball. If problems keep happening, you likely have a hardware problem.

If the disc is/was really screwed up, then the suggested reformat and re-write all may be the quickest way to fix everything, assuming you don't have anything on the player you can't afford to lose (or you have backups on the main PC). At least you now know what was wrong.