Did I brick my Zen Vision: M

[Rahul Mahajan]

I wish this wasn't my first post, but here it goes. I've had my 30GB Vision M for a few years now & never had an issue with it until a month ago I dropped the thing in the toilet. I ended up buying one off Amazon that had a bad battery but was otherwise new. I took the battery out of my broken one & everything started up perfect. Then issue number one begins. I keep having issues with transfers failing half of the way through (1,300 songs). I was able to upload half of the songs but now my menus keep lagging. So I do a firmware upgrade. The installation was moving along & then it rebooted & didn't turn on after shutting down during the install. It froze up completely so I unplugged it & tried to turn it on & it won't start up, nor will it boot into recovery mode. The power button flashes while I hold it down but the screen stays black. So have I bricked this thing? I downloaded the Recovery Tool & it won't do anything, I get a message that says "USER - Service it being updated at the moment, please try again later." I was getting the same message a few weeks ago with my old water-logged one. What can I do to recover this thing; I'm at a loss & getting really frustrated.

[Sn0w-Le0p@rD]

Did you start the firmware update with a full battery? If you have a wall charger for the player use it to charge the player before you tries to turn it on. It's never a good idea to load a large amount of files at one time. (Can burn out the motherboard) You may need to buy a new battery since you used the one that got wet. Just reply back does that worked for you or not and what was the fault.

[Rahul Mahajan]

It's possible that the battery wasn't full. I finally got it to turn on last night but it died after a couple minutes. But now the thing won't take a charge. When I plug it in it turns on but if I turn it off or it powers down on its own I get no signs of charging like the icon on the screen or the blue light under the power button. I'm 99% sure the battery is fine; it took & held a charge after the water incident. I'm going to hook the battery up to my fail one & see if that charges it since it has charged while in the broken one, that one just won't power up & the old hard drive is shot (it was making grinding noises when I tested it). Does Creative do non-warranty repairs?

[Sn0w-Le0p@rD]

Have you taken a closer look at the battery connector on the motherboard?? You bought the player & the problem was a bad battery maybe it is the board. I would check the solder point where the connector is, the wires of the connector on the board & the battery that came in the player. & the capacitors (I know i misspelled that one but you understand).

[Rahul Mahajan]

Visually it looks fine. Is there any way to test it? I have a multimeter if there are any contacts on the motherboard I need to check. This is really frustrating, it's my fault that I bought the second "as is" & he said it wasn't holding a charge so now I'm assuming it's the board that was stopping it from holding a charge, rather than the batter itself being bad. Now I have two useless MP3's players. Keep the ideas flowing; I have nothing to lose at this point. I think I have it holding a charge, I have no idea what I did but it seems to be working. I went into recovery mode because the player seems to be lagging when I push buttons so I tried to "reload firmware" but I don't know how to reload it after I choose yes. Is there an application I need to run or a file I need to find in the Creative folder? It's locked up until I can get the firmware to reload. Any ideas? This thing is driving me nuts & it's compounded by the fact that I'm going crazy being without music.

[Sn0w-Le0p@rD]

If you want your albumart to show up I would use Windows Media Player to sync. Don't try to load them all at once (don't want to burnout the board) The player is a MTP device & will sort them according to the metadata or MP3 tag info in the properties of the files so make sure you tags are correct by checking them on the computer first before loading to the player. I do all my tag editing thru Windows Explorer on the file itself. (Right-click file choose properties>details & change or add what I need to choose apply & ok.) If you are using Windows Vista it's easier to edit whole albums in the My Music folder this way.

[Rahul Mahajan]

I was finally able to load some music on my player & now here I am at work trying to listen to it & it keeps freezing & skipping. So I officially give up, I'm going to buy a new one. It sucks that I just lost $50 on this new player but after two weeks of trying I just can't do it anymore. I'm going to go crazy without music at work, I've been using my phone but the player on that really frustrated me.

[Sn0w-Le0p@rD]

Ok you can do one of 2 things to see if it helps. You can boot the player to recovery mode & do a Cleanup>Reboot so it can scan the drive. If that does not help you can wait till you get home & do a Format (will erase all files) Cleanup>Reboot. Then reload your music files back on to the player. I think the Cleanup>reboot should help if the drive is good. Also when you load a large amount of files it's a good idea to do a Cleanup> Reboot afterwards.

[Rahul Mahajan]

I'm actually ahead of you on this one. I did a clean up last night after I loaded some more songs & then powered it down for the night. So the issues I'm having is after the clean up. I did a format just before I re-loaded the firmware & loaded the new music files. I'm leaning towards the board being bad since it was previously having charging issues & now this pausing/skipping issue.

[Naruto Uzumaki]

It's amazing that after the number of questions and complaints that have been posted on the forum about the FM radio/ZVM problem. I have experienced the same problem, and Creative response is that I would be faster for me to return the unit to the place of purchase (Wal-Mart) to have it exchange than waiting for a RMA from Creative. And because it's beyond the 15 day purchase period (I bought this about 6 months ago), I can't return it. What will it take for Creative to realize that this is a genuine problem?