Andygjones was correct. The partitions were made by the disk builder before it showed the error.

It was only a matter of formatting the music partition and creating the fids directory.

I've had a huge amount of help from pgrzelak. He guided me patiently step by step though the process.

Again, thanks A LOT Paul!

It's now only a matter of uploading 46gigs of Mp3s to the player. That should keep it occupied for a fair amount of hours...

Riocar 58gig (48gig + 10gig IBM travelstar) S/N : 10101747 red