How to retrieve contents of faulty Creative Zen Xtra hard disk?

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ClubMan

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Anybody any suggestions on this...

My nephew's 60GB Creative Zen Xtra MP3 player has stopped working. It seems to lock up at the Creative EAX splash screen and never gets to the main menu. Activating the maintenance mode menu and using Clean Up does nothing (just displays the Scanning (?) message and nothing happens). Restoring/upgrading the OS/firmware doesn't help either.

I've read a few sites about Creative hard disks locking up in this way and recommending so called "percussive maintenance" (i.e. giving the player a whack or two on the site to free up the stuck hard disk :)) and we have both even tried this with no joy (yes - I'm aware of the risks involved!).

I took the 2.5" hard disk out and tested it with the hard disk vendor's utilities (it's a Fujitsu) and it passed all tests. I also tested it with a few other diagnostic/rescue utilities including SpinRite and none of them reported any problems.

It looks like the hard disk itself is OK but there may be some problem with the filesystem that Creative use that is preventing the player from booting up properly. Anybody know of any way to tackle diagnosing and fixing problems with such a disk - e.g. a utility that can understand the Creative filesystem and so the equivalent of a chkdsk/scandisk etc. on it?

I guess there's also a possibility that the flash memory containing the firmware could be corrupted or faulty but seeing that the firmware restore/upgrade worked OK I presume this is OK (i.e. I would expect this to verify the firmware written and even mask out dead sectors of flash memory if necessary).

Any other suggestions?
 
Re: How to retrieve faulty Creative Zen Xtra hard disk?

I had similar problems with an iRiver 5GB 'Pure' (i.e. no FM player) that I bought on eBay for my sister's birthday — at a 'bargain' price, but with a short warranty period. I wish you luck; my goddamn yoke is still sitting gloating balefully at me from the corner of my office, and I ended up buying Sister Dearest an over-the-counter iPod Nano as a replacement... :eek:

I think God may be trying to send a message to mp3-player aficionados.
 
Re: How to retrieve faulty Creative Zen Xtra hard disk?

Actually he has a second one but it looks like the hard disk in that one is totally screwed. When I installed the first one in my laptop it at least detected it (although obviously didn't understand the filesystem) allowing me to run SpinRite etc. on it. However the other hard disk didn't even register in the BIOS or with any of the diagnostic utils...
 
Re: How to retrieve faulty Creative Zen Xtra hard disk?

Just to clarify - I am looking for a way of retrieving the hard disk in it's current state if at all possible - in order to retrieve the contents. If this is not possible then I presume that zeroising the disk using the Fujitsu utilities and then reinstalling the Creative firmware etc. will restore the player to new/blank mode. At the moment the priority is to retrieve the existing contents if at all possible.
 
Re: How to retrieve faulty Creative Zen Xtra hard disk?

anything [broken link removed]
 
Re: How to retrieve faulty Creative Zen Xtra hard disk?

Thanks but not really - I've been through all of the information on Creative, NomadWorld and lots of other sites and haven't been able to find some way of recovering the disk by doing some sort of chkdsk/scandisk equivalent. I guess that Clean up in the Recovery/Maintenance Menu is supposed to do this but it just hangs. At the moment a reformat (raw using the Fujitsu tools and then higher level using the player) and reinstall looks like the only option. Of course this means the loss of the contents of the disk. Underlines the need for backups yet again...
 
Re: How to retrieve faulty Creative Zen Xtra hard disk?

Did you try calling them, and asking to speak to someone in the tech department in Dublin? They are based in Citywest if I'm not mistaken.

I found them very helpful in the past, they organised a swap for me when I called out to the factory with a Zen Xtra 60 GB that was defective from new.

I presume the nephew told you that it won't work without the Nomad Explorer software installed (i.e. its not simple plug and play).
 
Re: How to retrieve faulty Creative Zen Xtra hard disk?

Bootdog said:
Did you try calling them, and asking to speak to someone in the tech department in Dublin? They are based in Citywest if I'm not mistaken.

I found them very helpful in the past, they organised a swap for me when I called out to the factory with a Zen Xtra 60 GB that was defective from new.
Click to expand...
The players are not under warranty so I doubt that they will help but I suppose I could try all the same. Thanks for the tip.
I presume the nephew told you that it won't work without the Nomad Explorer software installed (i.e. its not simple plug and play).
Click to expand...
Thanks. I'm familiar with how the players work having an old [broken link removed] myself and all the latest Creative software (MediaSource Player/Organizer, NOMAD Explorer, Jukebox 3/Zen Xtra drivers etc.) installed. In any case the issue is not access to the player from the PC (via the Creative software - I realise that the player doesn't appear as a normal USB/FireWire mounted drive) that's the main problem but rather the fact that the player won't boot properly from the hard disk even though there doesn't seem to be any low level problem with it - i.e. it seems to be a problem with something like the proprietary filesystem on the disk itself that the Clean Up operation can't cope with because the Fujitsu and other low level diagnostics report no problem with the physical drive.
 
By the way - while I was referring to the Creative "filesystem" above it seems that these players don't use a filesystem as such but rather a database on the hard disk. See this link:
On writing NJB filesystem-like components:

Users of Unix-like operating systems in particular have a nack to
turn everything into filesystems. Naturally, many people believe that
the best way of accessing the jukeboxes would be through a filesystem
component, which is indeed also the way that USB mass storage-enabled
devices like the Nomad MuVo and other peripherals like digital
cameras do it.

The problem with the Nomad Jukeboxes is that they are actually not
filesystems: internally, the jukeboxes are databases. The Apple iPod
is engineered very much the same way. Thus, a "file" in a nomad
jukebox consists of a database entry with several metadata
components, such as artist, title, original filename, and the actual
MP3/WAV/WMA-file is just a binary large object (BLOB) in this
database entry. Such a database structure is not easily reflected
as a filesystem: when reading files off the device this is easy
enough, but when *writing* files, all relevant parts of the metadata
has to be added to the database. This means that a filesystem
component that is capable of writing to the jukebox would have to
include something like an ID3 tag parser to extract metadata from
the file and insert this into the database.

...

Database format:

The internal format of the database(s) used to store tracks,
files and playlists on the series 3 devices is actually known:
when listing the files on the device, an odd file with a 16-byte
serial number appears in the directory. This file actually
contains the file database so it can be examined. (We don't know
why it's there, perhaps for debugging?)

A typical beginning of the file will look like this:

0000: 0100 0100 0000 0000 0000 0e00 0000 0600 ................
0010: 000c 001c 620f 0600 000e 0928 0000 0600 ....b......(....
0020: 0016 78ca 7441 0600 0018 2000 0000 2000 ..x.tA.... ... .
0030: 0007 7200 6500 6700 6c00 6500 6d00 6500 ..r.e.g.l.e.m.e.
0040: 6e00 7400 6500 7400 2e00 7000 6400 6600 n.t.e.t...p.d.f.
0050: 1400 000d 5c00 4600 6f00 6f00 5c00 6200 ....\.F.o.o.\.b.
0060: 6100 7200 5c00 0000 0600 000c 001c 6218 a.r.\.........b.

...
Click to expand...
 
No joy in the end. Ended up zeroising the drive with the Fujitsu low level tools, reinstalling it in the player, reformatting it, reloading the OS/firmware to end up with a perfectly working but blank player. Oh well - I think that most of the content was illegal anyway. He has another identical one whose hard drive seems to be totally screwed - doesn't even register in the BIOS when installed in the laptop - and just clicks at startup. Percussive maintenance hasn't worked and I even tried freezing it just in case that helped. He wants to sell these players on eBay and buy a video iPod now anyway. Bloody students, eh? When I was his age blah, blah, blah etc....
 
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