Sat Apr 8 10:46:45 EST 2006
An iAudio Tease!
I finally got my much anticipated iAudio M5 20GB player a couple of days ago
and excitedly unpacked it to play. Following the instruction manual I charged
it and listened to the sample track. It sounded damn good! To bad that was
the only song I got to listen to before it died. 
Here's the story. I connected the player up to my PC and it detected as a USB mass storage device perfectly and showed up as /dev/sdb1. So I mounted the device, browsed the directory structure, and found a Music directory. I selected about 17GB of my music and started dumping it over. At around 14GB the copy process hung and I was forced to disconnect the drive without properly unmounting it. After several resets of the player and power cycling it a few times I was finally able to see the device and mount it again, except this time some of the directories were gone and others were garbled up. I figured it was a corrupt file system so I disconnected with the idea that I'd plug it into a my windows system, chkdsk it, and maybe reformat it. Well, it wouldn't recognize as a drive letter, and it wouldn't show up as a device again in Linux either. Now, when I turn it on it simply shows a "HDD Error" and shuts off.
I'm not 100% sure what happened. I didn't use the USB cable that came with it and I'm suspecting that the cable may not have been shielded properly causing severe file system corruption. You would think all USB cables would be the same though. Either that or I just had bad luck and got the 1 in 10000 or so bad units that slip past QC.
Either way, it's on its way back to iAudio for warranty repair or replacement. Their tech support was fast and efficient and I had an RMA number in short order. Support is only available 9AM to 5PM Pacific time though which is annoying. Being on the East Coast that means I have to wait until 12-noon to get support! Also, support is only available via online chat which worried me at first. But it worked out well enough.
Unfortunately they don't do advanced replacement so now I have to wait for them to get the player, fix it, and send it back. So, I'm thinking I'll be waiting until almost the end of April before I get it back.
Man! What a tease!
Here's the story. I connected the player up to my PC and it detected as a USB mass storage device perfectly and showed up as /dev/sdb1. So I mounted the device, browsed the directory structure, and found a Music directory. I selected about 17GB of my music and started dumping it over. At around 14GB the copy process hung and I was forced to disconnect the drive without properly unmounting it. After several resets of the player and power cycling it a few times I was finally able to see the device and mount it again, except this time some of the directories were gone and others were garbled up. I figured it was a corrupt file system so I disconnected with the idea that I'd plug it into a my windows system, chkdsk it, and maybe reformat it. Well, it wouldn't recognize as a drive letter, and it wouldn't show up as a device again in Linux either. Now, when I turn it on it simply shows a "HDD Error" and shuts off.
I'm not 100% sure what happened. I didn't use the USB cable that came with it and I'm suspecting that the cable may not have been shielded properly causing severe file system corruption. You would think all USB cables would be the same though. Either that or I just had bad luck and got the 1 in 10000 or so bad units that slip past QC.
Either way, it's on its way back to iAudio for warranty repair or replacement. Their tech support was fast and efficient and I had an RMA number in short order. Support is only available 9AM to 5PM Pacific time though which is annoying. Being on the East Coast that means I have to wait until 12-noon to get support! Also, support is only available via online chat which worried me at first. But it worked out well enough.
Unfortunately they don't do advanced replacement so now I have to wait for them to get the player, fix it, and send it back. So, I'm thinking I'll be waiting until almost the end of April before I get it back.
Man! What a tease!