what's wrong with my ZVM?

[Jon Waitneight]

Hey All, My 30gb Zen's been a work-horse for me, but recently, it seems to be locking-up during play, totally randomly, once or twice a day. It *seems* to have around the same amount of charge as it always has, maybe a little less, but nothing too drastic. When it "rebuilds" is pauses for a few minutes about a 1/3 the way across the screen. Do you think this is a hdd problem or a battery problem? Is there any other troubleshooting tasks I can try to narrow it down?

[CrowdAds]

[ZenChick]

It could be a sign of impending hard drive failure, so if you do not have a backup of all your stored media, then back it all up as soon as possible.

However, this is very likely simply due to database corruption, which does happen to otherwise-healthy players. To fix this, simply boot into Recovery Mode, select "Disk Cleanup", wait for it to complete, and then reboot. Be aware that "Disk Cleanup" will also change all your player settings back to factory default, which includes wiping out your FM presets. Your stored media and playlists will not be disturbed unless one of your files is the cause of the corruption.

If you continue to have random lockups, or if Cleanup does not complete in a timely manner (it normally takes a couple of minutes, but badly-corrupted drives can take quite some time. However, it should never take more than an hour), then the next step will be to reload the player's firmware, as it is possible your firmware became corrupt. If this, too, fails to fix the problem, then your hard drive is probably on its way out.

[hamm3r]

When I had this problem, I took it apart and reseated the hard drive ribbon cable. I've never froze since (and it used to freeze even when I first bought it).