I can now claim success. If you try this yourself and ruin your Zenstone, don't say I didn't warn you. After not really figuring out how to mount the FAT32 file system on a Linux box, I decided that, what the heck, $40 is fairly cheap tuition in the school of hard knocks so I pulled out all the stops. I decided to try to reformat the flash drive to something that would mount. Fdisk said that it was a FAT32 partition, but a very odd one. I ran fdisk on the /dev/sdxx device that the player created when plugging it in to a USB port. After taking a deep breath, I hit d to delete the existing partition and w to seal my fate and actually trash what was there. I then used /dev/zero and dd to write all 0's to every sector. This took about 2 hours using the slow USB port on my old system. I next used fdisk to create a DOS partition and mkfs.msdos set to create a FAT32 file system on the now pristine flash disk. It would now mount so I fed it some tunes. The player would die the very instant one took one's finger off the start button so I knew I had done something wrong and maybe even made nothing more than a portable flash drive out of what should have been a brand new MP3 player. I re-mounted it on the Debian box and gave it a good read through with fdisk again and realized it was identifying the partition as a Linux partition. It should be a windows FAT32 or VFAT partition. I had forgotten one small step when creating the partition which is to change the partition type under fdisk. You can list all of them and the one you want is type b which is Windows. I did that and had to reformat it again with mkfs.msdos set for a FAT32 file system. It all happened with no errors so I mounted it again and put in some more music. A portable AM radio is a good test tool, here, because you can hear the electrical noise generated by the player when it is on versus nothing when off. When I pushed and held the start button this time, it came to life and played just like it should. So, the operating system in the player is looking for a Windows file system and whatever Creative Labs did in formatting the drive the way they did is not essential to proper operation. It seems to work on a regular VFAT FAT32 Windows file system. Since accessibility is the main purpose of this list, I wanted everyone to know that you can still use one of these players with Linux. You just have to work a bit harder on these latest Zenstone players and no telling what is coming next, but for now, they are not inaccessible. The USB port only lets you mount the flash drive and you can not interact with the player's operating system. One of the Zenstone models called the Zenstone Plus has a tiny screen and the usual scroll and click type menus for operating the FM radio and voice recorder which are in that model. You can't read anything but the mounted flash drive so, unless you are helping a sighted friend, this little device is marginally usable, but not really. The model that has the 2-gig flash drive and no screen works exactly like the 1-gig ones from last year except that it has the tiniest speaker you ever heard built in to the player. It's like listening to music through your watch. Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK Systems Engineer OSU Information Technology Department Network Operations Group _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list