the best way to format would be formating with the akai itself in the load/save menue area, i would believe.... idk if you tried this. Ummm, with the missing file issue, you may be dealing with a simple file naming problem that the 2000xl loves to pull. Say you have a sample (or "sound") you named while editing on the akai... and it was 8 characters long, then u sliced it into 16 zones or whatever. When the mpc slices this and renames each file, it exceeds 8 characters when it slaps the numbers on the end of each zone. So, for some reason when you save your PGM's and Sounds, the mpc has an issue with file names longer that 8 characters and it will name all of the files the same thing. At this point I believe the files are still readable and accessible from the mpc's standpoint, like you can still re-load the whole PGM with the sounds ( I may be totally wrong). BUT, the problem is that when you move the session files to a computer, mac or pc... it's going to take all the duplicate named files and drop all but ONE file with that name. So if you're missing five samples, you probably had a 7 character file name to begin with, then sliced it, and the mp named all of the files up to "9", once you spilled into double digits, it started renaming files upon saving. This is just a guess. Basically, keep the sample names short. If this has been no help, sorry for the novel.
