[SnoopsterJ]

Hi, to jump right into the story, I tried turning on my H320 one day and the hard drive just sputtered and I got the "ATA error: -1" in the Rockbox bootloader. As expected, I also got the HDD connection error on the regular iRiver firmware. So, I took it apart to take a look and everything seemed fine. I started it up and it worked flawlessly. But everytime I put it back together, the hard drive would die again. Before long I would figure out that it was the battery putting pressure on the hard drive, due to swelling.

First of all, is there any way to fix the battery? Is there any way to squeeze what seems like pockets of air out of the shiny silver pocket? Oh, this is a new 2200 mAh iPod battery by the way and I just replaced it recently. I searched around and either couldn't find the answer or just didn't put in the right keywords.

Second of all, what could have caused this? I've read that maybe overheating causes batteries to swell, but I don't remember suscepting my player to that. Come to think of it, it's getting pretty chilly up here in Canada. I just charged it until it read "Complete," and immediately unplugged it. Given, I didn't use it for the next couple of days but I don't see how that would affect it. It was just charging on my desk in my room at room temperature.

I don't know if it's this "swelling" I hear about but I compared it to my old battery and the newer battery does have air pockets in it. Right now I'm player-less and quite frustrated actually - it was already bad enough that I broke probably over half of the clips trying to force the battery in, and then realizing later that I could have removed the padding (which I did). And now it's come to this. Any help much appreciated.

Snoopster J