Replace the Hard Drive and re-rip all of your music.
Carefully take apart the unit and keep all of the pieces (noting where each screw and such goes).
Take the broken Hard drive to a Frys or Best Buy and ask for the closest thing they have. A new hard drive will probably be bigger then the original one, but that should be OK.
Put the new hard drive back into place and put everything back together.
Upon start up for the first time with the new hard drive, it should format (or allow you to format). I had a Creative Zen that required reinstalling the operating system, but that was simple matter of connecting theplayer to my PC and running the little Creative program I had sdaved for just such an occasion).
From there, use as normal.
I was about to replace a 2nd hard drive on my Crative Zen whan I found a way to use a Compact Flash card in place of a spinning drive. It may not be as much memory, but even a 16gB card will hold some 8ooo songs.
With a 'Single Compact Flash IDE Adapter' (all over eBay), you can replace any laptop-size hard drive with a solid state Compact Flash card. No more mechanical failures.
AdmNaismith, February 2010
