I have the player working for now. Hopefully the file system will remain stable. In other howto's some have put partition tables on these kind of devices and then added a partition that matches the device size. However, my wife's player had a "bare" FAT32 file system (i.e. floppy format) on the memory device. So here is what I did to hopefully make it work.
The first thing to notice, that will hopefully prevent others much frustration, is that whenever the device is disconnected without a file system, the firmware automatically reformats it. So forget all those instructions that tell you to disconnect and then reconnect.
Before I did anything, I went into Linux and used "dd" to make an image of the original contents. After plugging the device in, I issued a "dmesg" to find what device was issued to it. You could also use "cat /proc/partitions" to find which one it is. My computer connected it as "/dev/sdd". So the backup image was done as
"dd if=/dev/sdd of=fake_backup".
GET THE RIGHT DEVICE NAME. OR YOU CAN ERASE YOUR HARD DRIVE BY MISTAKE.
After using a hexdump along with wikipedia's FAT32 information, I was able to figure out the filesystem parameters. Knowing the true number of (512 byte) blocks from H2testw, I was able to write a corrected files system on the device using "mkdosfs" from the "mtools" package. It may also be "mkfs.vfat". I used this:
"mkdosfs -b 6 -f 2 -F 32 -i 00000000 -I -r 512 -R 32 -s 16 - S 512 /dev/sdd 1787888"
Of course, you will need to replace "/dev/sdd" with whatever the device is on your computer. The first time I used a block size of 3575776 but it came out twice as big as I wanted. Apparently, H2testw is reporting ins 512 byte blocks and the mkdosfs is using 1024 byte blocks. So I had to half the number of blocks. I'm not sure which of the options are required, but I wanted to make sure that all available options matched what the original player file system had, except for total size.
Then I booted into windows, plugged the player in, and did a right click, properties, tools, check file system for errors. It did find some and fixed them.
Now when I turn on the player, go to system settings, and click on player information, the memory shows as 1745 MB instead of about 15000 MB.
Caution, if you reformat the player using the built in formatter, it will revert back to the false amount of 15000 MB.
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