After a little bit over a solid year of heavy use, my Zen Xtra is finally starting to fall apart. Half of the case is missing and the usb connection snapped off, so I cannot put any more music on it. The hard drive still works like a champ and has more space left, so what I'm hoping to do here is buy a cheap MP3 player (like 5-10 gb's or whatever) and connect my old harddrive to it. I like my zen and if it's still functional I don't want to go out and pay through the nose on a bunch of features I don't really feel the need for (I don't need photos and videos and cameras and phones and gps tracking systems and pocketknifes and all that other crap; I just want a portable music player). My original plan was to fit all the guts into a gameboy pocket, but since the usb connector snapped off I'm not really comfortable with soldering it back on (plus most of the "teeth" inside it are all bent out of shape anyways rofl)
Anywho, I am wondering how this will work out. I know 512kb and prolly even 2gb players wont have the extenal harddrives to pop out, but at what size do they start to be featured?
Since I have a Creative Zen, can I only buy another creative zen to hook up my harddrive to or can I buy another brand, like a toshiba or whatever?
MP3 player borked, need harddrive information
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I just found my old one of them yesterday. Had to fiddle with it a bit to get it working, but it's working better than ever. I'd say try to repair your one, not that hard to do. Planning to add an 80 gig hard drive to mine as it's nearly full of music.You can use the old hard drive in quite a few MP3 players, but if you want to get your music off it, you'll need the same model I guess otherwise the firmware won't work.
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bicostp
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512 kb? Wow, what is that the iPod Flea? 
It might use a CompactFlash size Microdrive, so you might be able to put it into a card reader. However the player might have an internal database to keep track of songs, and just dumping MP3s onto the drive might throw it for a loop. (Then again it might work; my cousin's Sansa m250 just behaves like a flash drive. It's a buggy pile of it but dropping MP3s onto it is simple.)
As long as the storage is removable you might be able to swap the drive into another Zen. (Or if it isn't and you want to risk the procedure you could desolder the flash chips off your broken unit and solder them onto an identical one's motherboard.)
It might use a CompactFlash size Microdrive, so you might be able to put it into a card reader. However the player might have an internal database to keep track of songs, and just dumping MP3s onto the drive might throw it for a loop. (Then again it might work; my cousin's Sansa m250 just behaves like a flash drive. It's a buggy pile of it but dropping MP3s onto it is simple.)
As long as the storage is removable you might be able to swap the drive into another Zen. (Or if it isn't and you want to risk the procedure you could desolder the flash chips off your broken unit and solder them onto an identical one's motherboard.)
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They use a ATA 100 Drive, but as it has the firmware installed on it, the hard drive will only allow you to access the music on the same model of MP3.
http://home.mchsi.com/~sallad/zen/tutorial.html
Thats how you can take it apart to replace the hard drive.
Edit: Also the charger charges PSP's. Lost my darn PSP charger, and Loco Roco
http://home.mchsi.com/~sallad/zen/tutorial.html
Thats how you can take it apart to replace the hard drive.
Edit: Also the charger charges PSP's. Lost my darn PSP charger, and Loco Roco