Digital Home Thoughts: Toshiba Gigabeat S Error Destroys All Content

Know what that's a (poor) picture of? A Toshiba Gigabeat S erasing all of its content. How did it happen? I have no idea. I picked up my Gigabeat S, and turned it on. I noticed it was very low on power (it seems to suck battery life in standby mode), so I moved it toward the power bar I had set up with the AC adaptor. I went to plug it in, and was presented with a screen on the device saying something like "To recover from an error, the device must remove all content". The only option was to select OK. I selected OK, and the device showed me the above screen while it removed all content on the hard drive. Sure enough, after perhaps 30 seconds the device rebooted into its default state and I had no content on it. Not a single song, photo, or video. I was baffled - why on earth would a device like this have a built-in function designed to wipe out all content?

Can you imagine having this happen while you're travelling? What if you had transferred over photos from your digital camera (a cool feature on the device) and they were your only copies? I have no idea why the device did this, but it's been working fine ever since - so I somehow doubt that it's a defective unit. Has anyone else seen this, or read about it elsewhere?