Mp3 usb stick and formatting

[Dark_Wolf]

Hey everyone
Allright, so I am most deffinetly not that familiar with linux, however I find that always having a cd of knoppix in the backhand when windows fails miserably is a good idea. So it was this time. My friend had cought one of the nastiest viruses I have ever seen, so I was booting up in knoppix to get some of his files before formatting the whole damn thing. Now my friend doesn't have a cd-burner, so we were going to use my mp3 player (which works like an USB key) to get the files. When I started transfering data, it said that it couldn't. Had I thought twice I would've known that it needed to be unlocked with a simple right-click of the mouse, however I didn't think twice, so instead I went and formatted the damn thing to FAT32. Big mistake. I got the files over just fine, however when I plugged my mp3 player in the windows 2000 system, it claimed that the player wouldn't start (error 10 in case you were wondering), and the player didn't show the usual pc-connect screen.
Allright, so ofcourse I can just take the mp3 player with me home, get the files out with knoppix and reformat the player. Wrong. Knoppix deffinetly sees the connected device, but after several attemps of mount, fdisk and cdisk commands it turns out that it doens't see it as an USB-stick at all.

Now I am unable to update the firmware since linux and windows refuse to "see" the device. I am unable to retrive my friends files (but at this point I don't care...I just want my player back and working), and the player refuses to do anything at all. Now my theory here is that the bios thingy on the mp3-player won't read anything but fat-16, and that I can't get access because the mp3 player doens't work with fat 32.

Anyone got any bright ideas at all? I have been unable to find any help on the manefacturers homepage.
The mp3 in question is the Muro MR-100.

Thanks

[Harry Kuhman]

You wre able to format it with Knoppix and you were able to write the files to it with Knoppix, but you can't see it again with Knoppix to get the files back off? Something is very wrong there; there is something you're not telling us, something you may not even know about. But I would focus on understanding this problem. If it's just a fat16/fat32 issue then once you get things good between it and Knoppix you may be able to format it as Fat16 with Knoppix. You might be able to format it with something else as well (likely not MS, but maybe other partition software).I would consider trying to get back in touch with the flash memory with some other computer (maybe even your friend's computer, his BIOS may have better USB support than yours).

[firebyrd10]

Can you just not view the contents of the player or it doesn't even exist as far as knoppix care.

If the first, you can try zeroing out the drive.

su
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

Replacing a with whatever the player is.

After that try fdisk agian.

[Dark_Wolf]

Well, I guess I wasn't really being clear: Linux knows that there is something connected through one of it's usb ports, it even knows that it's made by Muro and that it's called the MR-100, however it is quite puzzled as to what an MR-100 might be or why on earth I would want to plug one into my computer. This means that it doesn't mount the device (obviously) and that the device isn't in /dev/sda where it used to be.