Nano 3G clone questions

[segascream]

Just got a 3G Nano clone in the mail yesterday (purchased from eBay); claims to be 8gb. Immediately loaded it up with music and some quickly-converted amv files, and was surprisingly pleased. Decided to load it up with even more stuff this morning (pushing it beyond 2gig stored), and files corrupted. I shrugged it off, since I knew that's what I was most likely getting into anyway. So, I formatted, dropped music on there again, just to make sure before I tried to unhack it. Sure enough, after 2gig, files corrupted again.

Now, here's where it gets interesting: I decided to go ahead and attempt to unhack it after getting the "Disk empty!" message on my player, and files were corrupted when exploring in Windows. I followed the tutorial, skipping step 4 (SYS TOOLS >> MEMORY INFO showed 0%); when I checked properties in Windows following these steps, my player STILL shows 7.9gb storage (weird, but not impossible, I suppose).

So, I copy some files back over to the player (which, from what little I've tested so far, seems to hold over 2gb just fine); when I attempt to go into the music player, I get a "Disk error!" message; same with Videos, Record, Photos, and ebook. Games and Radio still work fine, however. After this initial test, I again removed all files, formatted, and only put 1 mp3 on the player (to determine if there was a memory issue of some sort), to which I still get the same error.

My questions:

1) Is there any reason, beyond being a genuine 8gb player, why, even after partitioning and reformatting, Windows would still show the device to be 8gb?

2) 8gig or not, I want my player back. Even if it's only 2gigs, it sounds a hell of a lot better than my old mp3 player, and looks sweet. How can I get it back fully functional?

Any assistance at all would be greatly appreciated.

[segascream]

Update: After a lot of playing around with formatting/partitioning, I've gotten the player to read as various memory sizes. I've also (upon setting memory to around 150mb), gotten the Record function to work again, and after saving a file in Record, the Voice function works again, as well.

However, I've currently got it partitioned to 1.89gb- at this size, going to "Memory" in the Setup menu only results in "Please Wait..." being displayed on the screen indefinitely. Likewise with the Record option.

I have copied 1 mp3 file to the player, and confirmed that the file remains uncorrupted. However, when I go to the Music option on the main menu, I still only get "Empty disk!".

Any help at all?

[segascream]

Solution [posted for anyone else who's brand new to the game]:

I was finally able to get my mp4 player to again read mp3 and amv files. It took quite a bit of messing around with the Partition/Encrypt/Format tools, but I finally managed to get it without cracking open my case, reloading firmware, or anything else.

First off, yes, I do have to settle for slightly less than 2gb...but I bought the thing for $20 (including shipping); having done a little research beforehand, I knew I most likely wasn't going to get 8gb (although I still hold out hope that it's there, and it's just a partition issue, and maybe once we get some better firmware, I'll have more memory, since both Windows and Linux are convinced there's a full 8gigs total there).

So, what you have to do is move the partition slider all the way to the right, run it; all the way to the left, run it, and then back to the right (but not all the way)- whatever is NOT selected as "encrypted" is your storage space for your music, videos, etc. If, after running this tool the third time, you don't have 2 drives pop up (in my case, it's F: and H, do it again; it seems the mp4 player will only work properly if Windows reads 2 drives (one under 2gigs, the second holding the rest of the possibly-phantom space). You may have to run this tool several times to make sure you get the absolute maximum space available for your unit.

Once you've gotten that sorted out, before moving a ton of music onto the player, I would recommend just putting 1 file on. Check to make sure it doesn't corrupt, disconnect from your computer, and make sure the file is accessible. If all that checks out, you're on to the next step. If not, keep trying the above step, and testing.

After you're sure it all works fine and you've got the max amount of space available, format. Partition/Encrypt will have left both F: and H: in FAT; format f: to FAT32. Occasionally, with this final format, you may wind up with some corrupted files on your F:; if that's the case, your H: won't format at all....go back and re-P/E. If you don't have any corrupted files after this format, you may want to format H:; it doesn't seem to serve any real purpose, as it's questionable if that space even exists, but if you format H: to FAT32, it will no longer appear whenever you plug in your player, and that leads to less confusion, and less risk of corrupting your files.

Hopefully this wasn't totally confusing, and was actually helpful to someone else.

[Spaniardgold]

Is this a lil blue player with a speaker in it. The way you desribe the screens inside make me think it's the same one I have. I ask this because I think I need to have mine loaded with different firmware or something. I've got corrupted files, my voise records work but the video player and the e books dont?

Oh and my laptop won't recgonize the mp3 player anymore,

Any suggestion??
Thanks.