I have an old Sansa Clip mp3 player that I used to use. I dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu, and I know that the Clip works just fine on Windows and that there are a variety of questions about the Sansa Clip on superuser. But I think my question is different.
I decided to try to mount the Clip and charge in while on Ubuntu. What could go wrong? I want to find it, so I run sudo fdisk -l and get
Disk /dev/sdh: 7916 MB, 7916748800 bytes
244 heads, 62 sectors/track, 1022 cylinders, total 15462400 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x6f20736b
This doesn't look like a partition table
Probably you selected the wrong device.
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdh1 ? 778135908 1919645538 570754815+ 72 Unknown
/dev/sdh2 ? 168689522 2104717761 968014120 65 Novell Netware 386
/dev/sdh3 ? 1869881465 3805909656 968014096 79 Unknown
/dev/sdh4 ? 2885681152 2885736650 27749+ d Unknown
Partition table entries are not in disk order
I thought sure - it doesn't quite understand what's going on. That's fine. Charge ahead. So went ahead and mounted sudo mount /dev/sdh ~/foo. So check out foo/, and it looks like the contents of the Clip. But upon looking closer, it looks a bit like there's nothing of content there. Let's display everything with human readable sizes, ls -alhR
$ ls -alhR
.:
total 1.9M
drwxr-xr-x 9 root root 4.0K Dec 31 1969 .
drwxr-xr-x 69 bar bar 4.0K Feb 25 08:51 ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Jan 1 1980 ALBUM
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Jan 1 1980 AUDIBLE
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Jan 1 1980 AUDIOBOOKS
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1.8M Jan 1 1980 MTABLE.SYS
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Jan 1 1980 MUSIC
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Jan 1 1980 PODCASTS
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4.0K Jan 1 1980 RECORD
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 51K Jan 1 1980 RES_INFO.SYS
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Jan 1 1980 SPORT
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 328 Jan 1 1980 SYS_CONF.SYS
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 0 Jan 1 1980 temp.dat
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 87 Jan 1 1980 version.sdk
./ALBUM:
total 440K
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Jan 1 1980 .
drwxr-xr-x 9 root root 4.0K Dec 31 1969 ..
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 36K Jan 1 1980 00000456L
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 36K Jan 1 1980 00000456S
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 36K Jan 1 1980 00000594L
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 36K Jan 1 1980 00000594S
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 36K Jan 1 1980 00001c5aL
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 36K Jan 1 1980 00001c5aS
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 36K Jan 1 1980 00003d54L
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 36K Jan 1 1980 00003d54S
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 36K Jan 1 1980 0000415eL
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 36K Jan 1 1980 0000415eS
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 36K Jan 1 1980 0000646cL
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 36K Jan 1 1980 0000646cS
./AUDIBLE:
total 8.0K
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Jan 1 1980 .
drwxr-xr-x 9 root root 4.0K Dec 31 1969 ..
./AUDIOBOOKS:
total 8.0K
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Jan 1 1980 .
drwxr-xr-x 9 root root 4.0K Dec 31 1969 ..
./MUSIC:
total 8.0K
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Jan 1 1980 .
drwxr-xr-x 9 root root 4.0K Dec 31 1969 ..
./PODCASTS:
total 8.0K
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Jan 1 1980 .
drwxr-xr-x 9 root root 4.0K Dec 31 1969 ..
./RECORD:
total 16K
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4.0K Jan 1 1980 .
drwxr-xr-x 9 root root 4.0K Dec 31 1969 ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Jan 1 1980 FM
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Jan 1 1980 VOICE
./RECORD/FM:
total 8.0K
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Jan 1 1980 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4.0K Jan 1 1980 ..
./RECORD/VOICE:
total 8.0K
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Jan 1 1980 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4.0K Jan 1 1980 ..
./SPORT:
total 8.0K
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Jan 1 1980 .
drwxr-xr-x 9 root root 4.0K Dec 31 1969 ..
There are a couple of interesting things here. What's with all the Jan 1 1980s? Or the Dec 31 1969s? More interestingly, nothing of any size is showing up here. Some vacuous files in the ALBUM directory appear, but that's about it.
But I see a MUSIC directory. I have some music. So I put in an album of music and nothing blew up. I unmounted with sudo umount ~/foo, pulled up the Clip, threw in some headphones, and voila - my album appeared! Will it play? I ask. Yes, in fact it does!
In fact, the proper things transferred. So the Clip correctly understands its album art, artist name, album name, etc. But I have one large question:
Where is the music already on the device?
You see, I already had some music on the device. But in the ls -alhR call earlier, none of it was visible. So where is it? I suspect the answer is a bit more subtle than simply a location (and more related to the semi-meaningless boot information from fdisk).
