Okay, I just fixed my faked 4GB Chinese MP4 player to its actual capacity (1946MB). And it wasn't easy, because all the problems mentioned in this thread (and not yet answered, until now below) happened to me. Everyone who had the MP3 Utilities fail or ruin your player, well the good news is your player is probably still okay, but that utility is not going to help you. I wish the author of the original post would add a honorable mention that not all MP3/MP4 players will fix with his encrypted partitioning trick, but there are other ways to fix the player's disk size too.
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I going to present this in separate parts:
0) Always run a CHKDSK.EXE on the drive and save the output before doing anything. Doing a backup absolute sector 0 (which may or may not be an MBR) also could be very helpful later if things go wrong.
1) MP3 Disk Tools complains: "Not detected removable disc! Please check the dics connecting, or reboot system!" (twice).
The utility then comes up but shows 0GB capacity. Chip Genius confirms this it is an Actions player.
This happened to me on the first computer I used. When I used the same software on another computer, I didn't get the message and was able to enter the utility and do the low level format re-partitioning.
2) The MP3 Disk Tools repartitioning steps do not reduce player's drive capacity. After moving the slider back to the left, it just went back to 4GB. No help at all!
You're going to have to try the disk partitioning trick in #6 to get the file system reformatted to the correct size.
3) MP3 tools hangs after pressing START while doing the formatting operation (either after sliding to the right, or after sliding it back to the left).
First, be patient. It might be normal delay. However, after maybe 10 minutes, it probably isn't going to come back and you are going to have to abort it. You can still click the CLOSE button even with the wait cursor up, and it will close too! The drive will be missing. When you unplug it and replug it in, your MP3 drive capacity might be 17MB. Mp3 player setup menu it says 0% of 00MB and Disk Error appears if you try to access the drive on the player itself. Try running the MP3 Utilties Disk Tools again. The hang was random for me. If it keeps hanging, you are going to have to try another approach (probably the hard disk partitioning trick in #6 below).
4) Windows recognizes the device when plugged in, but there is no new drive letter available!
For some reason, Windows lost the assigned drive letter for the player's drive while I was fiddling with these tools and changing its size properties. Go into Disk Management and right click on the drive and assign it a drive letter and it will become accessible again! BTW - If the drive isn't visible in Disk Management, Windows drive mounts are stored in the registry at
\\HKLM\SYSTEM\MountedDevices but make sure you don't mess up your C: drive's assignment!
5) The drive capacity is 17MB. Mp3 player setup menu it says 0% of 00MB and Disk Error appears if you try to access the drive on the player itself.
This is actually just the first drive appearing from the step where you expected two drives, but by itself. The rest of the space is there and can still be recovered. Try running MP3 tools again and repeat the process here. If that doesn't help, you'll need to try #6 below.
6) The player complains "Disk Error!" when trying to access the song/movie directory, etc.
Either running MP3 Utilities or Windows FORMAT changed the file system of the drive. Is it still FAT16 (or is it FAT32 or NTFS)? Did the utilties add an MBR? My MP4 player initially had no MBR and the drive would not appear in hard drive repartitioning utilities and could not be resized by Disk Management. One of these utilities added an MBR to my MP3 players flash drive. However, the player's firmware apparently doesn't know how to read an MBR partition table, and so just reports Disk Error!
Getting rid of the MBR can be a little bit tricky. I think MP3 Utilties itself did this to me, but FORMAT might have also. There is a silver lining in this event, and it is how I was able to finally resize my drive. Once the MBR is added, disk partitioning of the MP3 player's drive using standard hard drive partitioning tools (except Windows Disk Management, which doesn't like to partition USB drives) is now possible. And by partitioning the drive size down to the actual capacity, I was able to format the file system (using FORMAT.EXE x: /fs:FAT in the command prompt window) to the real capacity (in my case, it was really a 2GB drive and I sized and formatted it to a FAT16 to 1946MB with a 32KB cluster size). Don't accidently reformat C: or another hard drive by not specifying the proper letter of player's flash drive on the command line!
Once the file system was setup, moving it over the MBR is the last step. I rebooted into Linux to do this (I used Parted Magic Linux 5.5, but any Linux bootable CD including Puppy mentioned here or Knoppix, should be sufficient). Once at a command prompt, I mounted the MP3 player's USB drive and used DD to copy from the mounted drive into a file (you don't need to copy the whole 2GB since most of that is unused data area, just the initial sectors the hold the VBR, FAT and FAT backup, and root directory which are all at the front of the disk, in my case they turned out to be 561 512-byte sectors). Use a sufficiently large number to make sure you capture all the file system data to disk.
Next, unmount the Player's drive. But first, use the MOUNT command to display current mounts to make sure you know the device's raw access path! Next, I'd backup the current MBR (first 512 bytes of the device file), just in case this doesn't go right for you and you need to put it back. Also, be damn sure you have the right device path, as DD is merciless and could overwrite another hard instead if you don't have the correct path! Now, use DD again, but this time copy from the file system file you created directly into the device's raw path, overwriting the MBR with the VBR.
Once the DD write operation to the device is complete, try re-mounting the drive, and it should mount successfully and now the player can read the disk again! (using the device while connected to the computer caused an unmount with my MP4 player). Make sure Windows can also still access the drive. Make sure the drive no longer appears in your partitioning software (inexplicably, my did the first time I ran it, but the player still worked too and when I re-ran the program then it was gone!) Finally, of course, re-test the drive with H2TESTW to make sure you got the size small enough to avoid exposing the fake capacity to the file system (use CHKDSK.EXE to help determine that, being aware that the BOOT record, FAT file system, and root directory structures are *not* included in the reported disk size!).
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AGAIN, this message is now buried at the end of a very long thread, so I sure wish the original posting author would update their write-up to mention that his solution does not always work anymore but there are other solutions in the thread. Fact of life, unfortunately, is to get good deals on USB Flash drives and MP3 players now means you have to be prepared to fix the usual faked capacity.
