Mick
Well-Known Member
- Reaction score
- 810
- Location
- Cambridge, UK
Curious problem with an MP3 player. My customer reported difficulties transferring music from his Windows 7 PC to this player, so I took a look. What this guy is doing is transferring his old CD collection to his mp3 player. He takes a CD, rips it to his PC hard disk using CDex software, checks the rip went OK (basically, tries to play one or two of the files in Media Player), then copies and pastes them into the Music folder on his mp3 player. So far, so normal, and he tells me this has worked fine in the past - indeed, he has a ton of stuff already on the player, transferred by this means. However, things have started to go wrong...now, when he tries this (and I have replicated this on my own test machine), Windows explorer performs the copy/paste without any reported error, and the pasted folder shows up fine when the mp3 player's disk is browsed. It's the right size, contains the right files and generally looks good to go. But the player won't play any of these files, indeed, won't even display them - again, no error message, just click, click....click...nothing.
I've noticed that if I close Windows explorer, then re-open it, the pasted folder is still shown as existing, but is now empty and reporting 0 bytes as its size. Further, if I then delete this 'empty' folder, it does disappear, but Windows does not reclaim the disk space the folder originally occupied - you can get this back, but only by running 'chkdsk' on the drive. I've had drives and devices fail before now - haven't we all - but it's usually pretty easy/straightforward to diagnose. I haven't run into a situation where everything is behaving on the face of it exactly as it should, except that Windows just isn't doing what it says it's doing. I've checked the drive isn't read-only (it isn't) and has plenty of free space.
I would normally advise the customer that the thing is not worth wasting a lot of time and money on. However, he's spent quite a lot on the player, and also a lot of time moving his precious collection... and besides, I'm puzzled. What would make a drive behave like this? If anyone's come up against this or something similar and has any useful feedback, I'd appreciate it.
I've noticed that if I close Windows explorer, then re-open it, the pasted folder is still shown as existing, but is now empty and reporting 0 bytes as its size. Further, if I then delete this 'empty' folder, it does disappear, but Windows does not reclaim the disk space the folder originally occupied - you can get this back, but only by running 'chkdsk' on the drive. I've had drives and devices fail before now - haven't we all - but it's usually pretty easy/straightforward to diagnose. I haven't run into a situation where everything is behaving on the face of it exactly as it should, except that Windows just isn't doing what it says it's doing. I've checked the drive isn't read-only (it isn't) and has plenty of free space.
I would normally advise the customer that the thing is not worth wasting a lot of time and money on. However, he's spent quite a lot on the player, and also a lot of time moving his precious collection... and besides, I'm puzzled. What would make a drive behave like this? If anyone's come up against this or something similar and has any useful feedback, I'd appreciate it.
