Media Player acting weird

[Mephisto_Helix]

Ok, so I have a Toshiba media player (1TB) that, despite having had a funky remote from the beginning, has worked just fine. Until yesterday. There is still 400 odd gigs free on it and I added about 50gb's worth of stuff in a new folder but it will not show those files. I hooked it back up to the PC and the folder and files are all there so I deleted them, made a new folder and named it and copied all the stuff back in and wouldn't you know it, they still will not show up. Now today, as a test, I shoved the files into an existing series folder and they show up in there So basically, I cannot add any new folders in the main menu tree or it shows up as empty.

Does anyone have any idea why this is happening or what I can do to fix it all back up? Any advice would be appreciated.

 

[Yotch]

Have you ever tried to check the hard drive temperature after the unit has been streaming for a few hours. You should be able to use something like hddscan (www.hddscan.com) or speedfan to read the temperature data. If this is too high you could use an external fan to cool the unit. If a power surge has corrupted the data then a UPS might be worth considering.

Have you tried to run chkdsk in safe mode on the drive (I can't guarantee that this won't damage the data further though)?

 

[Mephisto_Helix]

Makes no difference whether the unit has been off for hours or not, new files can't be added into the main directory for some reason. I now have a folder called New Episodes sitting in the Top Chef folder because the Top Chef folder was an existing one. It's really really odd.

 

[Yotch]

Maybe there is a limit on the number of folders that you are allowed on the media player? Earlier versions of Windows used to be like this. You just need to look for a simple way to work around the limit.

 

[HAL 9000]

If your Media Player drive uses FAT32 as the file system - and NOT the NTFS file system - then this applies:

"To ensure compatibility with MS-DOS, Windows 95 uses a standard file allocation table (FAT) file system. The root directory for a FAT drive has a fixed size and is stored in a fixed location on the disk. All hard disk drives use 32 sectors of 512 bytes each to store the root directory. This limits the root directory on a hard disk drive to 16K: 32 sectors x 512 bytes per sector = 16,384 bytes, or 16K.

MS-DOS uses one directory entry for each file and folder, but Windows 95 uses additional directory entries to store long file names and folder names, and the associated 8.3 aliases. This means that you can run out of directory entries with fewer than 512 files or folders in the root directory.

Folders do not have a fixed size, so the only limitation to the number of files or folders you can store in any folder with Windows 95 is free disk space. For this reason, it is best to store your files (programs and data) in a folder off the root directory."

(See this link by Microsoft - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/120138 - for further info)

 

[HAL 9000]

The solution is to make MAIN ROOT folders for all your categories or genres of movies or TV series - then move all the specific folders for each series or movie genre into the MAIN folders - thereby reducing the number of folders in the ROOT of the drive - this should then hopefully alleviate your problem!

PS - Make sure that there are LESS than 512 files or folders COMBINED in the ROOT of your drive at ALL times, if it uses FAT32 as the file system!

 

[Mephisto_Helix]

It's NTFS but I'm still gonna give this advice a go ... who knows. Very interesting info, thanks guys.