How to remove data from a dead Creative Zen Touch

DrumSteve

Hopefully someone can help me here...

...Have a Zen Touch for years. Did me good, however the bloody thing has died and I have no way of removing the data off the hard drive. Is there any way to get data off the device without a working power source?

seamus

It kind of depends on which Zen touch you had and how old it is.

From a quick google, it looks like the storage in the touch is provided by a compact flash drive. So in theory it should just be a matter of popping that out and plugging it into a card reader.

In reality whatever version you have probably has a standard HDD in it with standard connections that you can use to plug into another machine. It depends on the version of the device though

DrumSteve

Thanks Chief, It's the HDD model. Would I need a pin connector?

Ste-

Those older models with HDDs actually use their own filesystem that can't be easily read with a caddy or such.
Easiest way is to get another working zen and plug it into it then transfer off working zen.
Try adverts for one, should be able to pick one up cheap enough if the music is worth that much to you.

thewintermute

If you have access to a usb caddy that will take the drive and a PC with an optical CD/DVD drive, you can run a live Linux CD and run photorec or similar program.

DrumSteve

Thanks lads, the only problem is, it wont turn on at all. Even if I plugged it in it won't come on.

Where would I get the caddy? Is it expensive?

beauf

Do you need the information or do you just want to wipe it.

If its the latter simply drill a hole through the disk.

seamus

If you're sure it's the older HDD model, then chances are it's a 2.5 IDE hard drive, the same you'd find in any laptop. If you google the exact model number and "replace hard drive" or something, you'll be able to confirm.

Something like this will let you plug the drive into any PC and use it as a USB drive in order to take you files off it.

As others say, the format means it won't instantly work, but there are ways around that too.

DrumSteve

Actually just want to get music off it tbh there are a bunch of songs on there that I recorded years back that i'm looking to get.

Would I still need to download the drivers for the zen to operate the HDD or will the hard drive run like a normal usb flash drive?

seamus

The zen drivers won't work at all if you're connecting directly to the disk. The disk will have a proprietary file format on it which windows won't be able to read. So as thewintermute says above, you'll need use an OS which is capable of reading this file system. You can get Linux installations which run entirely from a CD (so you don't have to install anything), which you should then (in conjunction with some other utilities) be able to use to read files off the Zen HDD and copy to another drive.