Dingoo A320 forum

My dingoo came well....unpartitioned. As in it had no partition table and the whole device was being read as one. As far as i knew this was a big nono? Im in the process of reformatting it now. Fdisk threw countless errors at me because of the drive and debian/gnome-volume-manager refused to mount it, it did however manually mount.

I'm thinking this is the reason people with windows 7 are also having issues? If so they are in luck, just fixed the issue. Just make a new dos partition table, slap a new fat32 partition on it and your all good. Just played a video off the new setup.

just a thought, this might cause issues updating the firmware. if so delete the partition and format the whole disk as fat32 and not an individual partition and your good to go.

My Dingoo is formatted without partitions also. I've seen this with quite a few USB devices, i.e. my old Samsung YP-U2 mp3 player. Volume managers in linux don't agree with it (I use thunar-volman so it's not gnome related) so I just mount it manually. Glad to hear it still works when you do things the right way... but I don't think I'll bother with it myself.

It's pretty annoying when devices break standards and conventions like this, but it's not really surprising. :/

yeah i also recall seeing some other devices set up that way by default. SD cards are a prime candidate. Mounting manually did work, but i had issues with the permissions on the drive, my user had no write permissions. I chmod 777'd the whole thing just to be sure and no go. Also tried to gain ownership and it was "not allowed". im just glad its working now, one less pain in the ass =p. just tried tvout, its terrible! looks like crap on my plasma lol

My tvout works great? Do you have the right settings in the tvout-configuration? Or is this the same on every plasma-tv?

i find moving the cord around isnt nice. The plasmas settings should be right, 4:3 aspect ratio with the same colour settings i usually use. It's probably the resolution being so low and stretched to 42". However i also have a htpc plugged into it and it looks HEAPS better playing snes emulators than the dingoo. But thats probably due to the fact that its plugged in via hdmi and can handle alot more filtering . I don't think the fact that its a plasma is the issue, although i've never tried any analogue input on it aside from vga.

I thought the screwy partition table might be the reason my Dingoo wouldn't automount.
So does your Dingoo still all work as before and automounts now? Then it looks like I'll have to do the same, thanks.

On the topic of TV-out it looks rubbish on my plasma, mainly due to the scaling/post-processing I think, but looks great on any CRT I've tried.

Yeah it works great, actually automounts now with no permission issues. Windows picks the drive up fine also. just flashed to team dingoos latest firmware and its working fine.(black dingoos have the older lcd controller for now).

The post processing shouldnt be an issue, it handles everything fine with its oblong pixels:P. 720p content looks great. (its one of the 1024x768 plasmas)
It's mainly the shoddy quality of the tv out cables i THINK. It's just kinda fuzzy. Tried on a 68cm crt tv and it looks a little better, mainly due to less stretching i guess. Overall it looks pretty shit though.

So does this mean that repartitioning and reformatting the dingoo's internal flash memory will fix the problems with getting it to connect with Windows 7?

Can anyone recommend a tool for Windows that I can do this with? I tried using the Disk Management tool that comes with Windows XP, but it won't let me remove the existing partition, and if I only reformat it as FAT32 it doesn't help with the Windows 7 problems. It looks like I'll need something else that is capable of deleting an existing partition on a USB connected drive.

I might have an Ubuntu live CD somewhere, but I've been off Linux for a long time now, and I don't trust myself to get it right anymore.
Can someone run me through the steps to do it on Liunux?

Thanks!

not sure under windows but the gparted livecd is about 50mb and its great.

instructions:
1. open a terminal
2. fdisk -l . get the name of your drive, something like /dev/sdb
3. fdisk /dev/sdx (x being the letter of the device)
4. press o to create an empty dos partition table.
5. press n for a new partition
6. set it as a primary partition and leave default values for start and end(max size).
7. mkfs.vfat /dev/sdx1
8. get back to me on whether it works under win7

g/l.

Thanks!
I'll give it a try tonight and let you know how it goes.