Okay, nevermind, the current play order IS on the dynamic partition -- Peter even said so, I just missed it earlier.

The first 512 sectors (each sector is 512 bytes long) of /dev/hda3 is used for the current play order. Here's what I know thus far, using a short playlist:

There is something resembling the playlist, but incomplete, in the first sector. In particular, the early entries in this playlist appear to have been zeroed out, but otherwise it is in the same format as what I report below:

In the second sector, is the playlist, stored 8-bytes per entry. Within each entry, the first 4-bytes are the FID (little endian byte order), and the second 4-bytes appear to be the same for all FIDS, at least that's the way it looks for my simple 3-album playlist test case. Let's call this the "FID table".

I do not know what determines the size of the playlist, but immediately following it on disk is the play sequence, with 4-bytes per entry. Each entry consists of a 4-byte (liitte endian byte order) position index for the "FID table". When the playlist is not being shuffled, these are simply the values 0, 1,2,3,4,5,.. in sequence. But press "Shuffle" on the remote, and then look at it again (after the disk activity indicator goes on and then off again..), and you'll see the same position indexes, but now in a randomized order, such as: 1a,c,14,16,7,0,9,f,..

The same wierd position indexes can be seen in the first sector as well.. shuffled there as well.

One could presume that for a longer playlist, these two copies of the running order will each span multiple sectors, instead of being contained within the first and second sectors.

The way I'm poking at this is easy: I just pop up the Hijack "Vital Signs" screen, and watch the FID change as I use the FRONT PANEL BUTTONS to change tracks. This gives me the running order, and allows me to move forward/back at will, and see the effects of shuffling. Then I also do a hexdump of the first 512*512 bytes of hda3 (fetch it from the player using httpd, and then dump it in hex using tools on my Linux box).

Okay, somebody else take over now.

Cheers