Initialising of the HD3...

[MDX-400]

What's the point of initialising the HDD on a Sony HDD DAP?

When I got my HD3 (used) it had some small amount of music on it (not even a gig) which I could access and play fine on the HD3; but, I couldn't use the HD3 with SS on my PC until I "initialised" it.

It was no big deal, the stuff on there I didn't care for, so I just initialised it and off I went and it works great so far... But what is the purpose of this? Is this to prevent someone who had a bunch of music on their player from giving/selling it to someone else who could then, in turn, use it on another PC?

Seems kinda dumb to me. I mean I see eBay auctions for HD3s and HD5s all the time stating the seller has x number of songs already on the player or so many gigs of music on it already. Does this initialisation business mean anyone buying one of those (under the assumption that they will be able to use all that music) will be disappointed? LOL.

Does this also mean if you were to have to format your HDD or reinstall Windows or SS or whatever, you'd be screwed?

I did a search and didn't really find out about the implicatoins of initialising and why you have to; but I did see some people complaining that they had to lose everything on their players. I'm just trying to understand how this works and how to be prepared for a situation where you one might have to end up losing everything on their player 'cause it won't connect to SS...

[Ishiyoshi]

I have always used the Japanese version of SonicStage for obvious reason and it never requires one to conduct hardware initialization. Other users have reported that the Asia-Pacific version of SonicStage offers the same benefit as well. So, you may want to explore this route.

[MDX-400]

I have always used the Japanese version of SonicStage for obvious reason and it never requires one to conduct hardware initialization. Other users have reported that the Asia-Pacific version of SonicStage offers the same benefit as well. So, you may want to explore this route.

Interesting... Are these versions available in English though? Because for 3.4 I dl'd what I thought was the JE (Japanese English?) installer and installed from that and it certainly did ask me to initialise (though I was upgrading a 3.3 install that was probably for the Canada region, can't remember now).

Nice to know that initialisation can be gotten around, though if I'd have to do it in Japanese or another language, it might be impossible for me, LOL.

[Ishiyoshi]

Interesting... Are these versions available in English though? Because for 3.4 I dl'd what I thought was the JE (Japanese English?) installer and installed from that and it certainly did ask me to initialise (though I was upgrading a 3.3 install that was probably for the Canada region, can't remember now).

Nice to know that initialisation can be gotten around, though if I'd have to do it in Japanese or another language, it might be impossible for me, LOL.

Only the Asia-Pacific version is of English UI and if you can't read Japanese, the former version would obviously be the better choice.