Hitachi Travelstar HDD

[Sjouke Burry]

I tried that a couple of different times, and it had no effect.

I did try the drive in my Zen and it does work, so it's not that the
drive has failed.

Have an old DOS desktop around?
With the old NORTON utilitys you can raw-read a drive.
Put the disk in the pc as second slave drive and examine it.
Advantage: Dos will not try to fool with your disk, unless
you tell it to.
We saved about a hundred program sources that way, made norton
produce a binary copy of the disk, then wrote a small program
to scan for program sources.As luck would have it, there was
not much fragmentation on the drive.
About 98 % recovery, even though the disk was damaged.

 

[SC Tom]

UVCView shows info for the Zen, and it does auto-refresh when I plug or unplug it.
I uninstalled Oracle VM and am going to try an older version that may be more stable (if that's the word), or maybe
one of the other VM programs. Since I'm using XP Home, Virtual PC isn't an option or I'd try that.
Thanks again!

Well, I tried Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 SP1, which, although the installation says it doesn't support XP Home, does work
with it, but has no (readily see-able) USB support, so that was a waste.

I then installed VMware Player ( http://downloads.vmware.com/d/info/desktop_end_user_computing/vmware_player/4_0 ) and
it's associated tools. I got a lesson from here http://www.technibble.com/how-to-create-a-windows-xp-virtual-machine/
on how to set it up and use it. Very slick and simple. I used my original XP Home installation CD, then installed
service pack 2 and WMP10, which were necessary to the whole Creative process. USB is supported, and I was able to see my
Zen player, but couldn't write anything to it since it still displayed a "Firmware Problem" error message (real helpful.
.. . duh!) I started the firmware flash program, and BAM! the VM rebooted itself and locked up on reboot. Got that
straightened out, and tried numerous other things, but couldn't get past the reboot/lockup problem. I was going to use
their forum and post a "how to" question, but somehow, they screwed up my account and I can't get into it anymore. I
tried to send them a "help me" request, but everything you do on their site requires you to log in, which I can't do,
but can't contact them since I need to login, but I can't . . . . Talk about a real catch-22. I might call them since
they do have a toll-free number, not sure if it'll be worth it. I do like their program, though.

I've since uninstalled it, since I have a new player, and really don't want to devote any more time to this problem. I
found myself staying up very late at night, which is fine since I'm retired, but I hate to get back in that grind again.
That was one of the reasons I retired when I did- I got real tired of those late nights, even if I was (sorta) being
paid for it.

And before the licenses police come to get me, XP SP2 was uninstalled with the VMware

Thanks to everyone for your support and suggestions!

 

[Paul]

the licenses police

The officer is just pulling up to your door right now

http://www.thevarguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/junior-geek-squad.jpg

Paul

 

[SC Tom]

The officer is just pulling up to your door right now

http://www.thevarguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/junior-geek-squad.jpg

Paul

Yeah, he'll probably be by later for his payment, in Reese's Pieces