[ILUG] Can Linux solve a windows problem?

[Declan Moriarty]

Windows XP seems to take the biscuit for messing things up. Latest is a
usb disk/mp3 player - a poor kid's ipod. It has a gig, a lcd screen,
will record, store mp3s and play. Windows apparently overwrote the early
directories. I have heard bad things about formatting these, as you lose
functionality.

 It shows 
[dec at genius ~]$ df /media/usbdisk
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda               1000032    210928    789104  22% /media/usbdisk

[dec at genius ~]$ ls -la /media/usbdisk
total 24
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 16384 Jan  1  1970 .
drwxr-xr-x  5 root root  4096 May  5 13:20 ..

but I can't put a file, or make a directory on it. 220
Megs WAS used. The data is irrelevant - the owner just wants a gig to
write more tripe into then listen to it. I did pull down a filegig back
(the first 250 Megs) and found it mainly zeroes.


Now dd will probably fill it with what he wants along these lines
dd if=somefile of=/dev/sda etc. but that also is a fairly neuclear
option. I do have 250 Meg versions (earlier/similar models). But I don't
want it to end up thinking it's only 250Megs

Wheezes Please?  Warnings Please?? Save my kid's a** please?? (Mind you,
he'll still probably insult you & yours ;-).
-- 
        With Best Regards,

        Declan Moriarty.