this precaution, but hey, They say I’m technically insane, so what do I know?
4. Remove the three visible screws from the MuVo2’s case. There is a fourth screw on the bottom of the case, and it’s con-veniently concealed by that nice, friendly WARRANTY VOIDED warning stick-er. As if you care, right? I’ll mention here that these screws are very small and often
hard to remove. That means you might have to use quite a bit of force to take out these screws, but do so with a tender touch, as the plastic case won’t endure much abuse.
5. Carefully lift the plastic panel. If you couldn’t remove the anger-provoking screws, use necessary force and violence, but keep in mind that even eviscerated (but otherwise undamaged) MuVo2’s sell for decent cash on eBay.
6. Because you removed the four screws that secure it, you can gently flip over the circuit board. If you need to apply force, use a flat-tipped screwdriver to carefully pry up the board. Then you
see a copper-colored plate that shields the drive. There are four screws holding the drive in place, but only three are visible at first glance. Remove the three you see and then gently peel back the black tape concealing the fourth screw.
Do not completely remove the tape, as it holds a small battery in place.
7. Now you can flip up the shielding plate and expose the Microdrive. Lift the Microdrive and use your flat-tipped screwdriver to (again, carefully) slightly separate the Microdrive from the pin array. Don’t try to pry out one side of the array all at once—doing so can damage the pins, the drive, or both. After you’ve sufficiently loosened
the pins, pull the drive from its MuVo2 prison and into beautiful, blessed freedom.
8. If your digital camera accepts a CompactFlash Type II card, you should be able to slip the card into the camera, format it, and immediate-ly begin using your huge, new drive.
9. If you want to use your MuVo2 with a CompactFlash card of your choice, now’s the time to do the job. Attach the pin array to your CompactFlash card, taking care to properly orient the card (when completely assembled, the card’s front label should face the same direction as the front of the MuVo2).
If you improperly affix the card, when you power up the MuVo2, you will see only “MuVo2” displayed on the LCD.
10.Reassemble the player. Be sure to smooth down the black tape covering the fourth screw.
11.Insert the battery and power up the MuVo2. It will immediately display a recover mode error message.
12.From the Recovery menu, select Format All, after which you will see a media error message.
13.Now, select Reload Firmware from the MuVo2’s menu. Connect the device to your PC using the USB cable and run the firmware upgrade program that you downloaded from Creative’s Web site.
Then you can use the MuVo2 as you did with the Microdrive inside.
There are few caveats on using the Microdrive from the MuVo2 to capture huge numbers of pictures on your digital camera. Because this is a hard drive, it has moving parts. And because those parts need power to read and write data, some users estimate 25% fewer photos per shooting session due to battery issues. The drive also writes data more slowly than a flash card, which means you won’t do much high-speed shooting with this Microdrive. The drive’s real appeal is its huge capacity and the fact that you can store thousands of pictures on one tiny piece of electronic equipment.
Mini Me, Me, Me!
Apple’s iPod Mini shares some simi-larities with the MuVo2. It’s a com-pact MP3 player, and it uses a Hitachi Microdrive with a CompactFlash card connector. But where the MuVo2 isn’t much more than a glorified plastic box, the iPod Mini is a beautiful work of art with slim lines, a tasteful and tough metal case, and the iPod’s legendary scroll wheel. How I yearn to disembowel thee, oh pretty iPod Mini.
I decided to remove the drive and attempt to use it in my camera and CompactFlash card reader. A number of other users have unsuccessfully attempt-ed this task, but I figurattempt-ed what the heck, if I ruin my itty bitty Mini, no big deal, it’s just an Apple product.
Of course, before you can attempt to make the drive work, you’ll have to remove it from the clutches of that nice iPod case. Doing so takes a lot more effort than with the MuVo2, and the ben-efits of doing so are iffy, which is one rea-son there hasn’t been a MuVo2-like mass hoarding of iPod Minis. Read along, and you’ll see how to see how the disassembly works and what you stand to gain.
Core that Apple. The iPod Mini’s big selling point is that it offers a whopping 4GB-capacity MP3 player in a miniscule form factor. That means there’s a lot of technology under the hood of these tiny players, and as such, you should think twice about taking yours apart. Not only do you take the risk that a part or two will break and render certain features unus-able, but at the very least, you’ll create
cosmetic blemishes on the player. So don’t say I didn’t warn you, Junior.
There are only a few tools you need to tear into the iPod, and the most important one is your head. Be wise and try not to use excessive force for any steps in this procedure. Beyond a few brains, you also need a small flat-blade screwdriver, a tiny Phillips screwdriver, and needle-nose pliers. You also need a well-lighted workspace with minimum clutter; otherwise you will end up losing the iPod’s tiny parts.
1. Slide the Hold button into the orange (On) position. This keeps the Mini from trying to power up during the dissection. Think of this as anesthesia for a delicate surgical procedure.
2. As odd as it sounds, you don’t need anything in the way of tools for the first part of this project. All you need is a way to warm up the Mini. This is to soften the adhesive that binds the Mini’s top and bottom plastic plates to the metal body. No, no, take the iPod out of the microwave, Junior. Here, drink this. There are a number of ways to warm up your Mini without resorting to a hellish conflagration. Some users warm the Mini with a hair dryer, but if you don’t have one at your disposal, you can set the Mini on that warm spot most ovens create on the center of a stovetop. Or you can put the Mini in a Ziplock bag and run really hot tap water
over the whole thing. Whatever you decide on, just don’t get the Mini so hot that you get burned. Don’t say I didn’t warn you because that metal case can get incredibly hot when it feels up to it.
3. Once the case is very warm to the touch, take out your small, flat-bladed screw-driver and turn the iPod Mini so that
you’re looking at the top area where the Hold button is located. The white plas-tic is a thin and rather flimsy plate, and it’s easy to remove using your screwdriv-er. The problem is removing this plate without gouging the heck out of the plate or scratching the metal case. Start by squeezing near the top of iPod Mini’s rounded sides. If you have enough finger strength, you can bend the metal enough to create a tiny gap for the screwdriver tip. This isn’t easy, though, so you might want to use a vise or clamp to apply pressure (just remember to protect the iPod Mini case from scratches by using a soft cloth). Slip the screwdriver in just a little bit on the side opposite the Hold button and pry up the plate carefully, working your way around the end.
When you get to the Hold button, be sure not to pry at too much of any angle or you risk breaking the button’s subsur-face components.
4. Repeat the previous step to remove the bottom plate. This plate is a little easier
to remove because there’s no Hold but-ton to worry about.
5. Once you remove the bottom plate, you’ll see a metal fastener that basically holds the iPod Mini’s guts in place. This fastener is nothing complex; it just has four legs that slip into slits in the inte-rior of the Mini’s case. To remove this
fastener, you need to pull at least two of those legs free. If you have a small enough screwdriver, you can insert the blade into the holes of the fastener and pull the legs free; if you aren’t equipped with such a small screwdriver, try using needle-nose pliers instead and start with the legs that don’t have underlying obstructions. One of those obstructions is an important data cable that you don’t want to gouge.
6. With the metal fastener out of the way, you have access to the short data cable that connects the scroll wheel with the main circuit board. The cable is a rusty
orange color. Take your flat-blade screw-driver and gently lift up on the connector to pull it free. As with the plastic end plates you removed earlier, take your time and work your way around the edges to make sure you don’t cause any damage.
7. Now focus your attention on the other end (top) of the iPod Mini where you removed the Hold button. If you look
closely, you will see two little screws on either side of the Mini’s interior. Use your Phillips screwdriver to remove both screws and then put the screws in a safe place. Lose those screws on the carpet, or even on a linoleum floor, and you will likely never see them again.
8. Those screws were the last parts secur-ing your iPod Mini’s innards, and now those electronic entrails are all but swinging blithely in the breeze. Turn the Mini around so you’re looking at it
from the bottom and use your thumb to push on the broad connector. The entire inside of the Mini will start to slip out of the top. Push and wiggle these components, and you can see the miniature hard drive that you’ve worked so diligently to free.
9. Only a strip of black electrical tape secures the drive to its connector on the mainboard. The tape is in one big piece, and it holds a rubber jacket
around the drive. To remove the tape, start by peeling away the large center area on both sides of the drive and then peel away the corners.
10.Now all you have to do is pull the drive off of its 30-pin connector. Use your flat-head screwdriver to loosen the connector on both sides and then carefully pull the drive away.
11.If you’re an Apple fanatic who can’t fathom what possessed you to do such a thing to a beautful iPod, on a bleak, cold night on a bridge overlooking the Hudson, turn your face upward into the rain with the drive clenched tightly in your fist, scream, “WHY, WHY, WHY??” into the foul night air, and cast the drive as far as you can out into the water.
You can use the drive in some flash card readers. I inserted the drive into my Lexar Media USB 2.0 Multi-Card Reader and then formatted the card to use a FAT file system.
I immediately attempted to transfer a few files to the drive and did so successfully, so to confirm that my test did work, I tried to view the files on another Windows XP machine. The drive worked perfectly.
With the Microdrive removed, you can use the 4GB as a massive, portable file transfer system. Of course, you could do the same thing with an intact iPod Mini, and that might actually be preferable to using the drive outside its case—not all card readers will detect the drive, making the advantages of iPod Mini evisceration somewhat dubious.
The 4GB drive won’t work in a digital camera. When you insert the drive into a CompactFlash card slot, your camera will either temporarily lock up or display an error message. Apple apparently had Hitachi disable the ability for the drive to work with most devices that use remov-able storage. When I cornered an Apple representative on a sidewalk outside com-pany headquarters one night, I asked her to tell me exactly what makes the drive inoperable in cameras, but she wielded a can of pepper spray and scurried off to
her VW bug while muttering something about “secret iPod magic” and “call 911.”
Next, I invited a Hitachi spokesperson to meet with me at a back table in a seedy bar. Of course, I extended the invitation under the guise that I was a large business owner who needed tens of thousands of Microdrives for a new MP3 player, but when the Hitachi rep arrived, I ripped off my mask and demanded to know why the drive didn’t do much when parted from the iPod.
The spokesperson, who shall remain anonymous for fear of company retri-bution, said, “Embedded Microdrive products are manufactured to different specifications than standalone Microdrive products. For example, we may lay mic-rocode in the final manufacturing process specific to needs of a particular device manufacturer. Microcode is software that is stored on the drive and defines the way the drive operates. It is tailored to the requirements of our customers. Users cannot alter the microcode because we do not provide a method to do so.” The spokesperson alluded to additional test-ing and manufacturtest-ing alterations used during the creation of the embedded iPod drive, but even after six High Lifes, he wasn’t ready to divulge these details. I considered spiking the Hitachi rep’s beer with a sleeping pill so that I could drag him back to interrogation, but alas, I no longer have access to that particular gov-ernment facility.
Keep On MuVo2’n
So, there you have it, the lowdown on cracking open high-tech toys to get at the more expensive and more fun high-tech toys inside. After reading the pros and cons behind MP3 player evisceration, you might opt not to take any risks with yours. For those of you who do rip your players apart, keep your eyes open for upcoming products that are sure to incor-porate Hitachi Microdrives, as the com-pany recently boosted production to keep up with high demand. Be mad and mod on. Mwa-ha-ha-haaah!
by Mad Modder