[johnnyzero]

Thanks for your intelligent & prompt response, Admin. I'll try your suggestions & see if that fixes it.

I'm not sure if a Windows Error Check will fix anything that the (3!) low-level formats missed, but it's certainly worth a try. I'm also gonna try the HP disk utility mentioned in one of the pinned posts about hacked MP4's, and see what that tells me.

btw, I tried using SwissKnife to do a format, but it wouldn't work for me - I got a write-protect error msg. It has some useful "disk info" features, though.

I suspect that this problem is a result of either poor design (memory addressing & buffering, USB interface chip, etc); or perhaps it's just a defective memory chip. At least I'm fairly certain that it's not an eBay hack job with half the advertised memory or something.

It's kinda weird that I can't use Windows to transfer the files, yet the bundled Media Manager can do it with no problem. Maybe there's a low-level difference in the way they transfer and buffer data to the player? Or maybe the Media Manager uses low-level, chip-specific commands that work better than the USB Mass Storage driver used by Windows? Who knows...

I'm also gonna try sending my files in smaller chunks instead of all 900mB at once - maybe 300mb at a time or something. If that works, I can probably live with it. This is really the only time I'm ever gonna need to transfer such a huge batch of files at one time. Once the bulk of my MP3's are on the player, I'll only be doing small transfers after that.

In any case, I'll keep you posted. I'm still curious if anyone else has experienced particular this problem w/ this model.

best,
JohnB