The Near-Demise of My MP3-Player

Last year before I embarked on a two-week trip back home, I searched for a portable mass storage device for backing up my digital pictures in lieu of a laptop PC. I landed on an Archos Gmini220 based on its good reviews at dpreview.com. At 170 grams and 20 GB, it is a small yet powerful device with a multitude of functions: it plays mp3, wma music; it records voice; it reads data from a CF card and downloads on to its hard drive; it displays JPG images (in gray scale). It was just what I wanted for a long trip. I used the Gmini220 to store digital picture on at least two trips and I was very happy with it. Lately the main use of the Gmini has been an mp3 player. I have about 14 GB of music on the device to choose from according to my taste and mood of the day. I find the large storage very necessary.

Then last Friday I listened till the player stopped. I thought that the battery died. I couldn't wake up the screen. That was normal. But something was strange: the light on the power button was still on. A bit odd. I didn't think much. I pressed on the power button to shut it off. I recharged it. I wanted to listen to the Sibelius Violin Concerto again because I want to write about it in my Part II of Two Evenings with the Orchestra. I pressed the power button. The screen lit up. Then it froze and in the mean time the device made several clicking noise. Very abnormal. After a long wait, the device said, "read access error: can's read from hard disk. Power off." OMG! If you can't read the hard disk, you can't do anything!

Panicking, I googled online for that error. There is not much information about it. Basically many things can cause read access error. It could be the firmware, or electrostatic, or simply a defective hard drive. The last thing is the one thing I worry about these hard drive-based mp3 players: it is not solid-state. It breaks when it's dropped. I dropped mine once, about 10 months ago. That can't be the reason why it's not working now. I updated the firmware, about 6 months ago. I recently installed Chinese font, two weeks ago. I had the player in my pocket while playing it this afternoon. No running or jumping. Nothing seemed to explain the read error. And of course, my player was out of warranty. I tried all the tricks people talked about: press on power button for 10 seconds to reset the player; plug in and unplug from a USB. Nothing worked. I checked its CF card reader function. That still worked. So it can't be the firmware. I was starting to get really frustrated. I was ready to open it up and had already started looking for a replacement 1.8" hard drive, which turned out to be very rare.

I suddenly realized how much I depended on this player. True, these ear buds in lab somehow make us stay in our own isolated realm (we probably have one player per person), but music makes tedious repetitive lab work less boring. Besides, now no one can complain about other people's choice of music. I loved my player. I still haven't used much of its recorder function yet.

Turning to our resident computer expert Dave for help, I plugged my player into our newest, most powerful PC. The PC couldn't recognize the new device because the player itself couldn't read. Dave was convinced that the hard disk wasn't spinning after carefully listening to it. Bad sign. He asked me to plug it into another USB that had been tested working. I turned off the player, and turned it on again. Miracle happened just like that: my mp3 player came back to life after two whole days' worth of revival attempts. I believe that it must be the powerful magnetic field of the new PC that released the electrostatic in my player. No matter for whatever reason my player came back to life, I am just happy that it did. It has been working just fine since. But I am not sure it will be my sole backup device on my next photo trip to, let's say, Africa.