~bohwaz/blog/

Lastly, after some data corruption issues on my CF card used in my Nexblack portable player, I emptied the card using dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc, but it seems that it wasn't a very good idea as after many attempts to reformat the drive using fdisk, cfdisk, gparted and all, it all ended with a "No disk" error from the Nexblack. I have to admit it seems to be impossible to format a CF card from Linux and make it recognized by the Nexblack. Even trying the "Format" option from the Nexblack doesn't work, the card has to be already correctly formated, what a shame.

After many tries, I tried to format the card with Windows XP and amazingly it worked. Basically it means that the Nexblack is really a buggy piece of hardware.

But the good news is that I made a working procedure for Linux to format a card so that it will be recognized by the player and you'll be able to format it from the Nexblack.

It's just a binary image of the first 1MB of a 2GB card formatted from Windows. So you can't use it directly, you MUST write it to the card and then format the card using the player, otherwise it may end in data loss and all.

So here's how to make it work :

• Download this image file
• Unzip it : gunzip nexblack-cf-disk.bin.gz
• Write it to the card : dd if=nexblack-cf-disk.bin of=/dev/sdX
  (replace sdX with your drive letter)
• Unplug the card, put it in the player and format it from the menu