Partially Dead Player

Adi · #1 (**permalink**) 3rd Nov 2006, 2:01 am

Hi All,
This is Adi from India. Greetings !!

Coming to the point directly, I purchased a 1GB MP3/MP4 player here in India for Rs 2000( US$ 44).
It was working fine for me and I regularly used it. I loaded some songs around 200MB of it and some files. I used it as a USB drive to transfer, word documents, excel files and some presentaions between my two offices and home.

Last month when i loaded some photos ( around 200) for showing them to my sister in Bombay, the player easily transferred all the photos, but refused to connect to my sisters laptop. Infact it was an embarrassment.

Now the player is not recognised by the USB port of my PC.I have tried connecting to it thru 4-5 PCs/Laptops of my colleagues at office, but nothing !!!

Mind you the player is not dead!! It shows the files loaded in it, playes songs loaded into it, the FM radio works and the text viewer works too.

In desperation i have tried to delete files from the player itself and it managed to delete all the photos as well as all the songs,but i still cant connect via USB. :? :x
I dont want to experiment with it without getting some knowledge about it.....as i've read lot of players becoming bricks after experimentation.
I am fairly conversant with technology, having assembeled my home PC by myself.

There are some important files loaded into it , which I cant afford to lose.
Will somebody here show me a way out of this, so that I can recover the documents loaded in the palyer...
If required I'll give the details of firmware in my next post.

Regards
Adi

lattesurf · #2 (**permalink**) 3rd Nov 2006, 3:00 am

Adi , seems like your player's memory was possibly hacked. i'm not very sure about data recovery, but if you go to download.com and searched for "MBR recover", there are a few data recovery programs that you can try on your player. But no guarantees. Keep us posted on your progress.

Adi · #3 (**permalink**) 3rd Nov 2006, 4:14 am

Lattesurf,
Thanks for the advice, but unless i am able to connect to my player, how will the said software recover data from it....

My problem is my PC is not recognising the player.(None of the 4-5 PC/Laptops i have tried does either) The problem is not with my PC's USB port as I also use Sandisk CF Card Reader and Transcend 2GB USB Drive on the USB Ports.

Regards
Adi

lattesurf · #4 (**permalink**) 3rd Nov 2006, 5:06 am

Adi , if that's the case, you have no other choice but to perform the Dead Player Recovery steps Here.
Take note of the ADFU installation, if your player is detected by your computer, see if you can access your memory through Windows.

Another alternative, which does not make sense, unless your data is worth a million dollars. Is to desolder the whole memory chip and manually retrieve the data from it.

Que · #5 (**permalink**) 3rd Nov 2006, 5:16 am

Adi, if possible try taking the battery out of the player, and connect it then to the computer. May need several attempts of connecting the player till windows picks it up. No computer nearby running linux, as another option? (it doesn't look like a computer problem, but linux sometimes isn't so picky on usb devices) Helped some, but still a wild guess.