3:28 pm May 30th, 2009 by wkallander

OK, those of you who have heard me complain loudly about not being able to load up my Creative Zen player (the generic version, not the vision) may be pleased to know that I’ve finally resolved the issue.

To back up for a second, here was the bad behaviour… I connected my zen to an Ubuntu box, loaded libmtp and mtp-tools using apt, and I was off to the races, happily syncing songs and videos to the player. Then one day it locked up and I pinned the reset button, and sadness ensued. The player would no longer mount as a device.

So, as a last resort, I brought up an XP VMWare image and attached the usb device to the vm. It recognized a new USB device had been loaded, but could not figure out what driver to use. I tried using the Creative Zen install CD that came with the player, and rebooted, but the OS still refused to recognize the player. I then tried using the Device Manager “Update Driver” function, but it could not automatically find the driver on either the install cd or online (or wherever else it looks). I even tried to burn a firmware update to see if that would help, but no luck there, it kept complaining that the Zen was not connected.

On a lark, I decided to try to set it up manually and see if that would get the OS and Zen talking. To do this, I went into the Device Manager, right-clicked the USB device that had a question mark on the icon, and selected “Update Driver”.

Then, I selected “Install from a location…” and “Don’t search. I will choose…”. The next part is fuzzy from memory, but I selected “Portable Media Device” or something like that, and then it gave me the option of setting it up as a generic MTP device. Perfect!

So at that point it could mount the device, and the display on the Zen changed to the “Docking” screen. Once that was done, I then proceeded to burn the firmware update, which succeeded this time. At that point I could finally plug it back into my Ubuntu box and sync my music collection.

So far the latest firmware (1.21.3) is far more stable in Ubuntu 9.04 with regard to mounting and unmounting.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 30th, 2009 at 3:28 pm and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.