How do I get music off of a dead Zen?

[theregularnew]

2 months ago my 4 yr old Zen decided to power off and never start again.

When plugged in to the computer or a wall charger, the blue light flashes for 20 seconds then shuts off. The screen never comes on at all and my computer won't recognize it. It won't reset either.

Customer support told me it might be the battery but they don't sell those.
It seems my only option is to buy a new one.

But 1000s of songs are on there and I don't know how to get them off.
I had them saved on my old computer and portable harddrive but they both crashed.

Does anyone know how to get music off a dead mp3 player and save it somewhere or transfer it to a new one? Maybe take it apart and put the drive into a new zen?

Any advice would be appreciated.

[CrowdAds]

[Dave_C]

First off I'm not on here very often and it may take me a while to respond.

Replacement batteries are hard but not impossible to find, you can try Googling the battery part numbers: BAC0603R79925 or KKBJGIBJ. The first one reports several hits on Ebay

Here is how to take your Zen to bits

And finally, you cannot get songs off a dead Zen. There is no drive as such but several surface mounted ICs.

Your only chance to recover these is to replace the battery.

Dave

[Brett_val]

I wouldn't rule out your old pc and portable harddrive. Depending on the type of "crash" it may be possible to recover the files from it. If the pc just doesn't boot the files may still be intact. And I've recovered the contents of a 2.5 inch portable harddrive that Windows wouldn't recognize by just connecting it to a linux pc.. it took a long time to read the drive but it was worth the time. Or run some recovery tool like spinrite on it.

And yes, replacing the battery of your Zen is a good option.