Internal Memory is used but tracks are not detectable

SanDisk MP3 players Sansa® Fuze™
1

Please, I hope someone is able to help me.  I’ve read a couple other posts and solutions for a problem similar to what I’m experiencing currently.  This is the second time this has happened to me.  I have an 8mb Fuze that I bought about 6 months ago to replace another Sansa product that finally gave out. 

I have a 8mb SD card inserted as well but I’m not having any problems with the card, just the internal memory.  I did nothing out of the ordinary when I unplugged my player yesterday morning and suddenly all the tracks that were on my internal memory are not showing up.  The memory, however is still used up.  Under settings it shows that out of 7548mb of memory ther is only 628mb left.  I cannot access my music tracks either on the player, through windows explorer or Rhapsody. 

I have many, many hours invested in my music collection and if I  again have to re-format my device I will be seriously P–d off!  I remember when this happened a couple of months ago it was when my internal memory was at about the same capacity so I’m wondering if it has to do with how much data is currently on the player.

I’ve tried solutions in both USB modes and hope that there is someone out there somewhere who can tell me the secret to recovering my music before Saturday when I have to run a race and need to have my music to get through it.

Any advice is much appreciated.  Thank you in advance.

2

Try checking the disk for errors in Windows/Linux/MacOS in MSC mode.  If you’re lucky, you might be able to recover your files.

That said portable disks running FAT32 are famously easy to irreversibly corrupt.  If thats your only copy, you may be out of luck.  If you have a backup, just format and copy the files over again.  

3

Waaaaaaaaaaaaa, It takes soooooooooo long to download from Rhapsody and it always freezes up while transferring.  Is there a better program??  I guess the main problem is that my music library is on Rhapsody.  If I get rid of it then I’ll really be starting over.

4

By error-checking, Saratoga means connect in MSC mode, right-click on the Sansa drive, Properties/Tools/Error-checking. Try it, can’t hurt.

If I understand, the music seems to be still on the unit  but the Fuze isn’t showing it when you are disconnected and turn it on. And you have tried MTP mode (which is what Rhapsody uses) and MSC, and Windows Explorer doesn’t see anything. 

When you connect in MSC mode, can you see anything on the Fuze in Windows Explorer?  (You wouldn’t see your music files, because they went over in MTP mode, which is invisible to your computer when you connect in MSC. The computer only sees one mode at a time.)

Because one guess would be that while the music is still there, the index of it is messed up. That index is MTABLE.SYS,  which I can see on my Fuze in MSC mode. You may have to tell Windows to “Show hidden files and folders”–look in your Help files for how to do that, since it’s different on different versions of Windows.

If you delete MTABLE.SYS and disconnect, the Fuze will  build a new table of contents  by reading through the files again.  It might take a while, but before you Format, give that a try.

You might also call Rhapsody customer service. You’re paying them for the music, which is full of digital-rights garbage, and they might have some tricks of their own to untangle it.

There is a limit on how many files–I forget, 10,000?–that  the Fuze will list on its display, and it’s possible to exceed that number if you have a whole lot of small files. But usually in that situation,  the Fuze just shows a limited number of files on screen–it doesn’t stop showing everything.

Are you getting the music through a Rhapsody subscription? Or just using Rhapsody to organize music files you are getting elsewhere? Because if it’s the latter, there are lots of other programs, starting with Media Monkey and Winamp.