I bought a year ago a tiny MP3 player Sweex Clipz MP300. I found it to be very tricky to format it in Linux. After few trials and errors I found a way.

First thing is that the mass storage device must not contain any partition device. So the formatting must be performed directly on the /dev/sdX device (not /dev/sdX1 or so…). To ease your life create a bash script like this:

#!/bin/bash

# erase MBR area
dd if=/dev/zero of=$1 bs=1000 count=1000
# create FAT system
mkfs.vfat -S4096 -s 4 -F32 -I $1
# refresh system partitions knowledge
partprobe $1

and run it:

$ sudo ./format_sweex.sh /dev/sdb

where /dev/sdb is the Sweex device. It takes about 2 seconds and it is done. Now you can mount it.

A week ago I bought another MP300 and I was surprised that the formatting does not work. The firmware is different. After another trials and errors I changed the formatting line to:

mkfs.vfat -I $1

and it works again.