Comment 41 for bug 211760

@rlandrum & everyone (esp. anyone with a Zen Stone MP3 player)

So today I tried reformatting the Creative Zen Stone, but unfortunately that seems to have broken it!

Symptoms: It won't mount manually any more, and it won't play back its audio either (when you switch it on, the light just goes off again after a second or two, which isn't its normal behaviour). Windows says it can't reformat it either. I've just done a support request to Creative to see if there's anything else I can try.

I realise this isn't strictly a Ubuntu bug question any more (or at least not the same bug), but I thought I'd better report back here to head off anyone else from landing in the same pickle.

It was definitely fine until I did the attempted reformat - I'd only just moved my data off it.

I'm not sure what happened, but the attempt to reformat may have run aground on http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?22138 - I did get an error message from gparted which I think was the same one, "Warning: Device /dev/sdd has a logical sector size of 2048. Not all parts of GNU Parted support this at the moment, and the working code is HIGHLY EXPERIMENTAL."

(so I would definitely suggest that if anyone _is_ going to try reformatting their Zen thing, they start with Windows, if they've got a Win box available.)

"fdisk -l" gives me

==== begin quote ====
Disk /dev/sdd: 990 MB, 990904320 bytes
31 heads, 61 sectors/track, 255 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1891 * 2048 = 3872768 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00090979

   Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
==== end quote ====

so that's a degree of recognition...

(other HDs in my system show some info under the headings too, e.g. "/dev/sdc2 7162 9729 20627460 b W95 FAT32" - but that's missing for this entry, i.e. no sign of "/dev/sdd1" or block count etc)

The attempt to mount it manually now produces

==== begin quote ====
mount: special device /dev/sdd does not exist
==== end quote ====

A friend's Zen Stone developed a similar "not completely dead but won't talk to anything any more" problem... but that one was solved by returning it under guarantee, so doesn't really help me now... except to not be too surprised. At least they're not super-expensive if it turns out it is a goner.

Attempted-rescue-type suggestions would be welcome if not considered too off-topic here! thanks.

Also thanks @ dstoian for the scripts - will be useful to me if a new or rejuvenated Zen thing still can't be made to automount.