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Or silly 3rd party applications that write song ratings to the skips count field... Hmm. I wonder what would happen if someone has a lot of FIDs and tries to use emphatic to write to a non-existent sector of hda3. What's after per-FID dynamic data? Running orders? Is 0x7000 the exact number that I should use to avoid writing past the end of the per-FID data?

The final 14Mb of the 16Mb scratch partition is allocated to per-FID dynamic data, one FID per 512-byte sector. So the 0x7000th FID (i.e. FID 0x70000) is the first one which can't be written. What happens when you try and write a sector beyond there depends on how you're doing it: if you've opened /dev/hda3 and are writing to it, then you'll just get end-of-file errors. If you've opened /dev/hda, or if you're using raw sector writes, you will corrupt the initial sectors of the next partition -- namely, the superblock of the music partition. That would be bad.

Peter