I imagine most people who have an mpx player have seen the "Format error!" message. I was a bit alarmed the first time I saw it, as I did not know whether it was permanent before I looked here.
There seem to be several ways this can be caused. The first is carelessly disconnecting a device from the computer without using "safely remove" or whatever the option to dismount a device is in non-Vista machines before unplugging it. The first time I got the error, I had left the device connected to the computer for a long time and didn't think there was any risk in disconnected it with an explorer window open. I guess it is best to be safe even if no application appears to be still using the mpx device.
On a later occasion, I was cleverly (yeah...) using one explorer window to delete some files on the mpx player and another to copy some new ones in in a different folder. No real advantage in doing this really, as it slows down both operations. Moreover, the player had a "format error!" afterwards, and this may (or may not) have been the cause.
I now suspect "format error!"s can just appear without doing anything particular, as I have seen a later one with no obvious reason, but I am not sure about this yet - other opinions may clarify.
Fixing format errors is straightforward, as I learnt here. Just use explorer to do a (non-quick) format of the disk. However, it would be nice to have another way when there are several gigabytes of perfectly good files on the player. I tried using the "Tools-Error checking" option from the properties dialog for the player in explorer. This seemed promising, as it found and fixed errors on the mpx player, and when I deleted the files I knew to be dud on the disk and added some more, they seemed to be ok...until a later one stopped dead with the hourglass and I found all the files added after that were dud.
The technical question is, just what exactly is going wrong to cause these errors on the player? Are there any other behaviours to avoid, and do they really just happen from time to time anyway? As an interesing comparison, I have had a 256Mb USB memory stick for many years (it cost £70 when I bought it - lol) and it has never had a faulty file or any other sort of error. And I don't think I ever bothered to do anything before I unplugged it when I used to use it regularly. Are the bigger flash memories in mpx players just inherently more prone to errors or is there a more subtle reason?
Avoiding and fixing the dreaded "Format error!"
