A friend of mine has an Archos Gmini 120. It's an mp3 & wma player/USB 2.0 Hard Disk. It has a cpu, harddrive, and operating system. Something went wrong with it, although I'm not sure exactly what it was. Now whenever you turn it on the following message is displayed.

File system error
No valid Fat16/32 file system found
Please format drive

I downloaded the complete user manual. Here's what it says in the user's manual.

Remember that you should create at a minimum, the root level directory Music in order for the Music icon to drop you into that directory. Note that by default Windows XP will format your Gmini Hard Drive in NTFS format. This will make the Gmini unusable. Make sure you tell it to format the drive in Fat32 format. If the hardrive is 40gb, XP can only format in Fat32 up to 32 gigs. Thus you will lose 8 gigs of storage space. You will need to use a 3rd party program such as Partition Magic or Norton Utilities to format the entire 40gb of space in the Fat32 format.

The hard drive of my friend's Gmini is only 20 gigs. So can I format the entire space of 20gigs without a program such as Partition Magic since it isn't up to 40 gigs? If so how do I go about formatting this device? If not then how would I format it using Partition Magic, which I already have but don't know how to use.

attach it to the computer(should show up in my computer), right click>>format

I tried to format it. I went ahead and changed it to Fat32. I also named the label JUKEBOX like it was supposed to be. I just got a message that said "windows was unable to format the drive". This is all the info shown under Disk Management for Drive F:

F: Basic, Online, Layout: Partition, File System: (it's blank), Type: Basic, Status: Healthy, Capacity: 18.1GB, % Free: 100%, Fault Tolerance: No, Overhead: 0%,

When you right click and choose format a menu in the format window will allow you to choose FAT32 or NTSF .

I tried to format it. I went ahead and changed it to Fat32. I also named the label JUKEBOX like it was supposed to be. I just got a message that said "windows was unable to format the drive". This is all the info shown under Disk Management for Drive F:

F: Basic, Online, Layout: Partition, File System: (it's blank), Type: Basic, Status: Healthy, Capacity: 18.1GB, % Free: 100%, Fault Tolerance: No, Overhead: 0%,

Try defragmenting it, if you can

Dont know if this will work, just a suggestion of things to try--
Try to format it in FAT, and not FAT32, and see what happens.

Also, I am sure that the MP3 Player's Tech Support has encountered this before, you should try contacting them.

Or maybe, it means it turns to NTFS, then no mattter what its unusable??
Dunno, dont have much experience with MP3 Players.

I don't know how to defragment the device. I tried to defrag using the default windows defrag, but drive F: isn't showing up. Also..the manual says that I should format in FAT32 format. Anything else would render the device useless according to the manual.