Cowon S9 32Gb does not work with Linux

[kevin]

...and Cowon is not fixing it, even though they claim to support Linux hosts

I bought one from an eBay seller last week, and the first time I tried to copy files onto it, it turned into a brick. Now I have a £200 paperweight

Just a warning, in case anybody was thinking of buying one. Actually, the problem isn't exclusive to Linux, but it seems to affect Linux users more.

[mitchelln]

Wow, so you just copied some media onto it and it died?

[kevin]

Yep. And it's not at all unusual -- quite a number of people have reported this. Typically it fails after a few Gb of continuous transfer. But people have reported problems with smaller transfers under Linux, and also with larger transfers using Windows XP. The defining feature in each case is that unit displays a message `no fonts, no resource file' and the next time you switch it on it, er, doesn't switch on. There is no known solution.

I'm particularly miffed because I bought my S9 from an eBay seller who is refusing to do anything about it. So, unless I can send it back to Cowon in Korea somehow, I have a very expensive desk ornament.

My own greed is to blame -- I don't normally buy gadgets other than from high-street stores, because I've had too many of them fail. But in this case the price was just too good to resist. Oh well, we live and learn :/

[mitchelln]

That is just bloody outrageous!

[kevin]

Indeed. I can hardly believe that, after the number of times I have nagged other people not to buy gadgets from places that don't have a postal address you can serve a writ on, I've bloody well gone and done it myself, and got shafted.

It's sad, because I've long been a fan of Cowon products, and they've generally worked fine with Linux, even when they didn't claim to support it. But to fail with Linux when they do claim to support it is just ridiculous.

[Peverel]

What a total pain, and I was considering a Cowon for when my 605 dies.....................

[kevin]

To be fair to Cowon, this problem only seems to affect the 32Gb model of the S9. Earlier Cowons seem fine, and it seems that the 16Gb S9 is OK. There's just something freaky about the memory on the 32Gb unit. But you certainly shouldn't consider a 32Gb S9 right now if you use Linux, and quite possibly not even if you don't.