NW-HD5H "skipping" tracks

[dab_dare]

I dont remember doing any major drops of my player recently, but my HDH5 has started playing up during playback. I tried clearing my database and recopying stuff over, but it's just moved the problem to different tracks.

It seems to be struggling to read certain sectors of the HD and for certain songs are "randomly" filled with a song played previously. I'm guessing this is some kind of RAM/caching thing kicking in on the player, meant for when the hard drive has trouble accessing, but for some reason it's not caching the current track, but something from the last track or one before. I fear the HD is dying , but could it be a RAM problem?? Anyone know if the HD5 uses RAM for caching the current song in all cases, or only when it has trouble reading the disk?

It's a long shot, but has anyone experienced similar and/or know best way out of this? I have back-ups so my next option is doing a format and re-initialising the player (and possibly doing a disk check in windows?) but i'm worried that putting all my tracks back on the same sectors may just recreate the problem.

Any other suggestions or tools to check out the disk and maybe correct bad sectors? I did notice disk and RAM checks within the service manual, but i guess these will just highlight a problem, rather than fix it??

Appreciate any comments/advice!

Greg

[DaveJB]

I have just run into the same problem myself after my player was dropped. I was going to try to initiate the player, but seeing that didnt work for you I shall avoid the hastle, thanks.

I have rang Sony about the problem and they state they do not know (or at least the advisor on the phone didnt know) and said to send it back. For the minimal charge of £70 that I was quoted on the phone I'm not going to bother sending it back. I don't how severe your problem is, but I only get the skipping on 30ish% of my albums(and its always the same ones!), so im just going to put up with it.

[dab_dare]

Thanks for the reply Dave.

I have gone down the re-initialisation route, along with a format and disk check from within the service menu and a few runs of check disk in Windows.

At appears from all of that, that there are some bad sectors on the disk of my unit, the amount of which may have been reduced. I've got about 1/2 my stuff back on there, with the drive about 1/3 full in total and i'm only aware of a very small % of tracks skipping (i've noticed about 5 overall)

I've also gone back to using SonicStage CP 4 to transfer, after playing with a number of "easier" drag and drop and player integrated tools (MP3 file manager and winamp plug-ins). SS seems to hae less problems hitting bad areas of the drive, but that may be due to the disk format and recovery of bad sectors.

Whether i hit more problems as the disk fills up remains to be seen, but as long as i can keep my favourite tracks skip free, i'm happy to forego some of the overall capacity (i've even added a few "dummy" zip files where i think problem areas were on the disk).

I'll be sticking by my HD5 for now. Until higher capacity flash players arrive, at least!

[MDX-400]

If the errors are occuring due to bad sectors the best thing to do is perform an in-depth HDD scan by a program other than the standard Windows one. Have it go through and mark all the bad sectors as bad and then they won't be used again. Hopefully there aren't too many as to significantly reduce the size of the HDD in any way.

[DaveJB]

Well I eventually got fed up of the tracks skipping, I re-initialised the player, then tried to do the error checking etc. Only problem is my player seems to have a more severe problem than yours...

Once scanning begins the device conks out and becomes unrecognised by windows. In fact it now doesn’t like being written to at all, connecting it to the computer is fine, but as soon as I try to access the player or use any software that manipulates it, it conks out... Can’t scan for errors or put music back on it if I can’t access the player... Oh dear, looks like the £72 repair fee for me...