January 11, 2011

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.
  5. 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
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This happened very suddenly on my phone. Most photos were lost and music tracks. My solution was I switched it off and back on again. Hey presto, everything back to normal :-)

Anarchius said...

@Anonymous: I guess that makes you lucky indeed. When my music database got corrupted, no amount of reboots helped. :)