Resurrecting an MP3 player

I have this MP3 player purchased more than three years ago. It's made by a company called iRiver, and the model that I own is an H320, a hard-disk based player which can do the following:

Play MP3 and WMA (of course!) Play FM (hmmm) Record FM (hmmmmm) Record Voice with an inbuilt microphone (cool) Record through line-in (that's neat) A line-out jack (standard :-|) USB port () USB 1.1 host (now, that's something! It means that you can connect compliant, self-powered devices (that means almost all of them) directly to it and transfer files) Display text files Play video (AVI and a few other formats)

That's quite handy, don't you think? Thank you.

Anyway, this device was playing dead ever since I tried to connect it to my new laptop. That was nearly six months ago. I'd been meaning to open it up and see what the problem with the battery was (I'd assumed that the problem was with the battery), but since I didn't have a screwdriver of the right size, I left it for later. It was only when a friend asked for some songs from it that I realised that I had stored all my TNS collections in it! Now, I simply had to do something.

So, I went to a friendly neighbourhood computer shop and asked the technician to see if he could open the thing up, check up the battery and supply a replacement if he could. Making it clear that they didn't deal in batteries for anything other than laptops, he obliged nevertheless by opening it up. I decided to take it from there, and here's a picture-by-picture illustration of what happened.

This was how it looked before I pried it open.

This is what it looked like after opening the case. Notice the black edges? Nothing but insulation tape.

This is a part whose purpose I couldn't figure out, but going by the fact that there are wires connecting it to the body, I'd guess that it's the battery. It's wrapped around in insultation material.

The thing on the right looks like the hard-disk.

Notice the thin edge between the gaps in the blue material? It's actually the edge of the circuit board. The metal at the bottom is for the connecting screws to be seated.

The blue material is quite rubbery, and I think it's mainly for shock absorption.

At this stage, I decided to connect it to the PC once again; you know, just to see if things would be different now. And were they!

To my surprise, the thing started charging from the USB port, something it had stoutly refused to do in my earlier attempts at making it work. I gladly disconnected it from the PC, and hooked it up to the standalone charger, and now it's getting filled with juice quite contentedly.

So, while I really don't know why merely opening up the MP3 player should resolve the problem of it refusing to start up, it feels good to have my MP3 player back in action. Welcome back, iRiver, I missed my ARI and TNS collections among others :-)