Okay then! Got my drive yesterday (was a bit worried...it was packed rather poorly).
First I installed the battery (following
these wonderful wiki instructions).Then I replaced the drive (I'll be adding pictures tomorrow, probably). Next, I reassembled it. It was a bit of a squeeze, as the new battery is a mm or two thicker than the stock one, but it fit nicely.
Charged the battery, and then booted up. Of course, the rockbox bootloader was patched on the old firmware. It got to the splash screen and froze (At this point, I'm like "Oh fvck"). Okay, try the stock firmware then. SUCCESS! It booted! Now, I figure I'll use the onboard formatting utility, on v1.65US. I try it, and it flashes "Can't Format!" at me. Oh dear.
So I plug it in to my PC, and start messing around with The Add/Remove Hardware Wizard. Eventually, I figured it out and was able to use Windows 2000's built in formatting utility to properly partition and format the disk. My instructions (with screen shots) can be found at
this wonderful wiki page. It finishes formatting, and I load a clean firmware copy and flash to it.
Next I load some music on, and now for the final test: will it play properly? Was the hard drive the problem afterall? Or was there another problem? I select Geto Heaven T.S.O.I. by Common and Macy Gray as my test track. And it plays! Incredible! For once, I actually
fixed something!
So I load some more music and listen for a while....but I can't. The stock firmware just isn't good enough. I was hesitant to reload rockbox (mainly because of the aforementioned boot issues). But I decided to bite the bullet and go for it. My worries were for naught - it worked perfectly. And issues that I had previously experienced before replacing the drive were gone. Checked the available space: 28,607MB. Very nice. Went into Menu-->General Settings-->System-->Battery-->Battery Capacity, and changed it to 1800mAh (my new battery's capacity). Fixed up all my settings, reloaded my WPS (Modpod1.0 - it's in my sig) and I was good to go.
I'm still reloading music, but other than that, everything is back to normal! And it's sooo nice to have my jams back
