Interesting thing about a hacked player
 

Hi, I had a supposed 2gig player that turned out to be 512MB which I was able to recover thanks to the excellent tutorial and utilities on this great site. But what's interesting is that when I backed up the drive prior to formatting it the total files added up to 664MB, but the player is really only 483MB, so that even though it could not hold the advertised capacity of 2GB in it's hacked state, it could actually hold about 200MB more than its real capacity of 483MB.

Could this phenomenon be used practically to allow a player of a given capacity to hold more than its actual capacity as long as it was done deliberately to ones own player and not to decieve anyone? And how can it actually hold more than its acual space?

Have you checked your files? Some of them will be damaged.

These hacks are messing up the partition information and file allocation tables so that allocation units that should be unique get crosslinked. Thus, when you add more files than the device actually can store you start overwriting chunks already on the player.

Well said Zaphod.

Check to see if those files are not corrupt or damaged. It might well be due to the hack.