Nokia 5800: Corrupt music library

My Nokia 5800, despite being a music phone, is horrendous with the management of its music library. For no reason its database decides to go corrupted; showing 0 songs available.

Turns out there are a lot of people facing this problem. After a fair bit of searching the interwebs, this is a method that seems to work. You need - your Nokia 5800, a USB cable, a PC (mine runs Windows XP) and the Nokia Ovi Suite installed on your PC.

1. Connect the phone to your PC. Select the mode "Mass Storage"
2. On my computer the phone shows up as F: drive. Open Windows Explorer to "F:\private folder" (see screenshot).
3. There are three sub-folders of interest here. The first two contain .dat files that need to be deleted. The third one contains the key database files for podcasts and mp3 files. They need to be deleted. The table below shows the folder, and what you need to do.
4. Under no circumstance should you delete the folder itself. If you are not entirely sure about deleting it, you could rename them or move them to a different folder on your PC.

Location	Files to delete
Private\101f8857\Cache\E	Delete all .dat files you can see in the folder.
Private\101ffca9	Delete the one .dat file you can see in this folder, called harvester_db.dat.
Private\10281e17	Delete the following [101ffc31]mpxv2_5.db (or .db file with mpx) [101ffc31]pcv6_1.db (or .db file with pc) [102830AB]thumbnail_v2.db (thumbnail DB) dummydb.dat and any files that end with .db-journal

5. At this point you have music on your phone and no library. Lets try to fix that. Disconnect your phone, and reconnect it in the "PC Suite" mode.
6. Using Ovi Suite, delete and restore music on your player. If you are using Sync capability, just delete the existing music and hit Sync. If you are doing this manually, you could copy music back to the PC and re-save it onto the phone.
7. Disconnect. Start the Music player. If it still insists of "Searching for Music" press Stop. Your music and playlists are already available on the player.

Note that any mucking around you do comes with risks. You could potentially a) invalidate your warranty b) corrupt something else or c) worse brick your phone.

If all else fails, do a soft reset (not just a factory restore). There are a lot of articles that can walk you through how to do this. But remember, you will lose your data while doing a soft reset.

Cheap Terabyte RAID on Network

Background: We need storage space. And we are not that good with keeping backups. And it is always a good idea to be a little cheap. I knew I was never going to afford a RAID 5, but I figured it was just a matter before RAID 1 became more accessible.

Ingredients:

• 1x Cavalry Dual Bay Hard Drive Dock (EN-CAHDD2B-D)
• 2x WD Caviar Black 1TB SATA Drives with 32MB Cache at 7200 RPM (WD10000LSRTL)

Buying instructions: Buy the Cavalry Dock for $19.99 (including $10 mail-in rebate) from Buy.com. Get the two terabyte drives from Best Buy during their Black Friday sale for $59.99 a piece.

Assembly and physical setup: Tear open boxes and covers. Try not to make much of a mess. Setup the jumper configuration into 0-1-0 per provided instructions. Slide the two Terabyte drives into the two slots provided on the Cavalry Dock Bay.

Configure and Format: The Cavalry drive is a classic plug, crash and play USB device. In the RAID 1 configuration, the device shows up under Windows XP as a JMB352 RAID-1 USB device. The two drives are not shipped formatted, so while you can see the plugged in USB hardware, it will not show up as a drive. So you will need to create a partition and format the drive.

Go to Start > Run, type diskmgmt.msc and hit enter. Here is what I saw.

Disk 1 is what I added, and it had not been initialized yet (in other words the space has not been allocated to a drive yet). Right click, select New Partition, and go through the defaults. Assuming you want to keep the Terabyte to just a single drive, you want to format a Primary partition. And I chose to not do the Quick Format, as I had other designs for the drive and wanted to make sure it was really good to go.

Network it: This was going to be the trickiest part. My router is a Netgear WNR3500L Wireless Router.

The great thing about this router, among many others, is that it provides a USB port that you can use to plug a USB drive in and have it visible on the wireless network. The tricky part was going to be compatibility - I wasn't sure if the USB chipset was going to play nice with the router. Fortunately, they did decide to play well with each other and as a result I now have a network accessible RAID 1 storage of a Terabyte at an additional cost of about $139.97 (plus tax).

Circular Feeding

This is a good one. When I set up my new site-wide syndication service, through feedburner, I decided to redirect my blogger feed to feedburner as well. But about an hour later, I noticed, that I had over a 100 entries in my feed, with mostly duplicates and an increasing count. Something surely was not right.

The setup: So here is what I have. Two feeds - one from blogger, and one manually created. Both were sent to Yahoo pipes, to be mixed re-sorted. Feedburner then picked the final product up, and, well, burned the daylights out of it.

The problem: When I set up the blogger redirect, the yahoo pipe data request began to be redirected to feedburner. So my pipe began with data from feedburner, added my manual feed, and supplied data back to feedburner. A pretty little infinite loop. Good thing I checked an hour later.

The solution: First things first, I shut the redirection off. Then I began to search the Interwebs for a solution. I did not do so well initially. I found a few pages that described my predicament (almost), but none that came up with a solution. I almost gave up and began to draft a post on the mosh pit called Google's help groups - when I found this. Thanks Chuck.

Turns out, when you append the modifier '?redirect=false' (without the quotes, of course) at the end of any blogger feed, the feed, doesn't get redirected. Instead you get the original feed from Blogger. Woohoo! You'd suspect something like that has to exist, considering Feedburner does not tie itself into knots for every blogger re-direct out there. Beats me why this would be such a secret though.

Here is a message to all you Blogger RSS users out there. Look for a modifier. They do not seem to be documented anywhere. Nevertheless, look for one; that will fix your problem.

Nokia 5800 - free space on C drive

If you are like me, capacity constraints have a tendency of sneaking up on you. And when they do, suddenly everything you do is hamstrung by the capacity limit you never even knew existed. Ignorance in this case, seldom is bliss. The same happened with my Nokia 5800, which led to this post.

The Nokia 5800 comes with two storage options - the C drive (Phone memory) and the E drive (Memory card). The Memory card is the bigger storage, and Nokia bundles in an 8GB card with the phone. The problem however is the C drive or the phone memory. A fresh install will give you a tad more than 80MB, but you seldom get that in actual usage. Which is what makes it crucial to maximize the amount of phone memory you have to ensure the device does not let you down when you need it the most. Here are a few things you could do to make sure you have the most memory available on the phone.

• Install new applications on the Memory card: Fairly obvious, but as you get and install new applications on the phone, choose "E: Memory card" during installation. There are of course some applications (mostly from Nokia) that don't play nice and do not let you choose. Nothing much you can do there, other than to see if you can live without them.
• Remove any applications installed on Phone memory: Go to the application manager in the phone settings at Settings > Application mgr. > Installed apps. Applications installed on the Phone do not have SD card icon next to the application. Make sure you have the installable of the application handy before you uninstall it by choosing Options > Uninstall > Yes. Of course, there will always be some applications and components that need to be installed directly on the Phone and cannot be installed on the memory card.
• Delete the emails content from the Messaging client: If you are using the standard messaging client (The one that does both SMS and email) for email, then deleting the emails (and attachments) will free up some memory. Go to any of the email folders setup in the phone and do Options > Delete > Phone Only > OK. This will leave the headers in the phone but delete the email content to free up space.
• Delete unused mailboxes from Messaging: If there are email accounts setup that you do not want to use anymore, delete them by going to the Messaging application and Options > Settings > Email > Mailboxes, select the Mailbox you want to delete and click Options > Delete > Yes.
• Change default Messaging drive: You can also configure the standard messaging client to store data on the memory card instead of the phone memory. To do this go to the Message client and do Options > Settings > Other > Memory In Use, and select "E: Memory card".
• Reconfigure mailboxes on Nokia Messaging: You can reconfigure your mailboxes to manage the amount of data in the phone. Go to email.nokia.com, to choose which folders are synced with the phone. In the section "My email addresses" click on the link "Edit settings". In the section " Mail folders to sync" un-check the folders you do not want to access from your phone. To make sure that the phone is updated, open the Nokia Messaging application (This is different from the regular Messaging application with an icon that looks like the @ sign). Go to Options > Tools > Settings, and click the General Tab > Reset data. This re-loads all data in the email, but without the folders you have un-checked previously. Of course be warned that this make take a while.
• Configure Ovi Store to install on the Memory card: You can configure Ovi Store to install directly to the Memory card. Open the application and go to Options > Account > Settings > Installation Preferences, to set it to the Memory card.
• Clear downloads folder: Your download folders is probably set up on the memory card. Then it is not going to impact your Phone memory, but in the event that is not the case, make it a practice to delete the downloads as soon as you are done using them. Go to the standard File Mgr and go to C: Phone memory > download, select the downloaded files and delete them.
• Delete temporary & cache folders: You will need to download & install an alternate file manager like the Y-browser to do this. Once you have it installed you should be able to see and delete the following folders. C:\System\cache (This is the browser caches), C:\System\dmgr (This is where temporary files are stored by the browser). Both folders will be recreated the next time you start the phone browser. Next drop into the two temporary file locations C:\System\temp & C:\temp and delete any files you see in there.
• Clear Google Maps cache: Google maps downloads and stores a bit of data on your phone, depending on how much you use it. To reset the data cache in Google maps, start the application and go to Options > Tools > Reset, to get back some of that.
• Do a hard reset of the phone: This is a drastic step, probably not something you want to do unless the situation is dire and none of the steps above have helped. The site allaboutsymbian.com has a guide to perform a hard reset - follow it and good luck.

And that hopefully should get you some space back on your Phone memory, as it did mine.