okay, figured out the first part...
i replaced my 710x unit with the 910x unit and the hack took, for some odd reason, the 710x unit will not allow me to apply the hack *i can screw with later, however just letting you all know*
it sees my 120gb drive now with about 40gb worth of tunes, however the voice prompts are on, and its not actually playing the music, im suspecting the database is borked and im re-indexing now.
looking forward to having vast amounts of tuneage for those long drives to other states
btw, the hack and repair cd worked great to reformat my original 9gb drive, i didnt have to rely on picking up another OEM disk from Phatnoise at a lovely expense of about $60.00 for another 10gb.
will let you know my findings, this ability to reverse engineer these units rock, and i count my blessings your here.
-cp