Wednesday 2 May 2012

Car MP3 player cares about partition type

In my previous adventure I used a USB stick to attempt to install Crunchbang Linux. After that I returned the USB stick to its normal duty. I am not sophisticated enough to have an iPod dock in my car, but the CD/MP3 player in my old bomb can accept USB sticks, so I use it to carry music for car trips.


But when I inserted the stick the player showed NO FILE or ERROR. What had I done?! Had I destroyed the stick?


Wait a moment. When I reformatted the USB stick for installing Crunchbang, it had changed the partition ID to Linux instead of FAT16. Neither the Linux kernel nor the system utilities cared that the partition ID was not DOS, they happily mounted the DOS filesystem or displayed the contents. But the car player did check the ID.


A quick edit of the partition ID with fdisk and the stick worked again. Phew!

No comments:

Post a Comment