DMS "killed in action"

[my2kmx5]

Recently my car battery died. I removed it and recharged it without incident except my music keg failed to work after starting the car. After trying various troubleshooting methods I determined the DMS was the problem. I have other DMS’s, which would work in the keg, and the DMS in question will not work in my other keg nor will it load up in the cradle. On inserting it into the cradle red and green lights will come on with the green light flashing at frequent intervals, but PMM never loads and eventually the lights go out. The drives are not seen when looking in "my computer". Windows icon does appear re:safely removing hardware. Is there any chance of recovering the 60 gigs of music on this DMS? Anything to try or can it be serviced by some computer experts? IF it is really dead then is this DMS a candidate for hacking?

[VorTechS]

The chances are the drive is fried, so if you haven't already done so - prepare yourself for the worst (and that way if anything we come up with doesn't work, you won't be disappointed).

Now, although the drives may not appear under Windows you need to check whether or not the disk is actually recognised.  Assuming you are running Windows XP the easiest way to check this is to:

1. Go to 'Start', 'Control Panel', 'Administrative Tools', 'Computer Management'
2. Select 'Disk Management' and a list of the attached disks will be displayed

If you see your 60GB drive listed, at least it has some functions available....so the very first thing you should probably do is run a manufacturers diagnostic check on the disk.  Most manufacturers have diagnostic tools for the disks, to perform basic and detailed surface scans of the disk to check for any non-usable disk problems.  If you can run a successful diagnosis of the disk, and assuming no partitions are available, then the question becomes...have you ever run a DD backup (manually or through the use of the DMS tools)? 

If so, then you need to recover the image the DD backup has created and then put that back onto the drive. 

This may recover the partitions to a point where you can pull everything off. 

If you don't have an appropriate DD backup, then perhaps someone else does have one for a 60GB drive for the first 1MB of the disk only.  In which case perhaps they can make themselves known and you can go from there.....

[my2kmx5]

The DMS was not in the list of drives listed in Disk Management after using the tools suggested. Any more options? There are some files I would love to have on this DMS so if there is anything else I can do I am open to suggestion. If not then is this DMS one I can use for applying the hack? I have two other DMS's that are "original". By the way does original mean having not been hacked or is it mean the exact DMS that came with the keg upon purchase? I am a novice in computer use and lingo so I am worried about doing the hack without doing damage to my system.

[VorTechS]

If you can't see the disk under Disk Management, I'm afraid it's fried.  You might be able to send the drive off to a specialist file recovery place... but unless you are a millionaire it really wouldn't be worth the effort.

I'm afraid you'll need to re-source the missing files.

The PhatBox hack is safe, even for novices.  The few problems that have cropped up, mostly exist in the latest beta (not public) and in fact, I'm only aware of one person with problems with that (who incidentally hasn't gotten back to me with the required information).

Try v2.10 of the DMS tools first and if you are unable to run the hack with that then you can join the 2.12 beta and if you run into problems I'll help you through it.