driver for sylvania mp3 player

[JeanB]

I got my son a cheapie mp3 player for his birthday but when I plug it in to my pc it doesn't show as an external hardware. It is able to charge but we're unable to load any songs onto it. It's a Sylvania model SMPK2066....I'm running Ubuntu 8.04. Is anyone able to help?

[MikeTbob]

HIya.
Try creating a new mount point for the device like so:

sudo mkdir /media/USB

Now I'm guessing that it has FAT32 filesystem on it, and I am also guessing it's the second drive on your system, if it isn't then you need to change the syntax of this command to reflect that.
so you would mount it this way.

sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sdb /media/USB

Now if all went well, your files should be in /media/USB and you *should* be able to drag n drop your files there. Let us know if you have any errors and post them back here.

[JeanB]

Thanks for the quick reply Mike. I followed those instructions but it says "cannot create directory `/media/usb': File exists"

[MikeTbob]

That's fine, it just means you can skip that part, please continue.

[JeanB]

This is the message I get when I enter the second code line you gave me.

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so

I'm also not sure what you mean by "your files should be in /media/USB and you *should* be able to drag n drop your files there"....I don't know where this is.

[MikeTbob]

Ok, we'll need to use fdisk command in a terminal window. Be sure the device is plugged in when you execute this command.

sudo fdisk -l

(small L not an I)
Post the output of this command so we can see your disk structure and figure out where to go from here.
After you get the device to mount properly, you will be able to browse to /media/usb to find or add files on the MP3 player.

[JeanB]

Here is the output to the command: (Btw, I really appreciate your help with this.)

Disk /dev/sda: 40.0 GB, 40000020480 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4863 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000080

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 4675 37551906 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 4676 4863 1510110 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 4676 4863 1510078+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
Note: sector size is 2048 (not 512)

Disk /dev/sdb: 1999 MB, 1999372288 bytes
64 heads, 58 sectors/track, 263 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 3712 * 2048 = 7602176 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x97165205

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 263 1952396 b W95 FAT32
Partition 1 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
phys=(0, 0, 5 logical=(0, 1, 1)

[MikeTbob]

Alright, you are doing very well so far. I believe the code you need is this:

sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /media/usb

The above command should mount the media player. After you mount it, you may use nautilus or any file browser to view the files on the media player by browsing to /media/usb/
Now, once you have successfully mounted any device, you need to unmount it before you remove the device, use the umount command

sudo umount /media/usb

You are welcome, that's what we are here for, to help people just for the fun of it.

EDIT: Be sure and check out the man pages for mount and umount
Open a terminal window and issue these commands, or any other Linux system commands that you would like to read about, this is a very cool built in system user guide which can be extremely useful if you do not have Access to the Internet.

man mount

man umount

man man

Use the spacebar for next page and use Q to quit the man pages.

[JeanB]

Now it gives me thie following message:

mount: special device /dev/sdbl does not exist

[MikeTbob]

sdb1
it's a one not an L