my slightly dented Jukebox Zen

The Enclosure

Like most people, I’ve got a lot of old electronics lying around.  Broken ones, out-of-date ones, and a few I just never got around to using much.  I recently came across one such device, an old relic of an mp3 player. A Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen NX… quite a mouthful. This particular device served me well as my trusted mp3 player for my first 2 years of college.  With a 20GB 2.5″ laptop hard drive and drag-and-drop USB transfers, it was a desirable player back in the day. But, one day it just wouldn’t power up anymore, and it found its way to the bottom of one of my junk boxes.  After I rediscovered this little gem, I decided to take it apart and see if that old hard drive was still functioning; and if so, build myself a nice little portable storage solution.

In order to put together an inexpensive portable hard drive, you’re going to need to find yourself a used drive somewhere.  A quick ebay search returned a ton of results for drives a lot bigger than my 20GB going for around ten to twenty bucks, or you may already have your own un-used hard drive lying around.  Whatever your source for a cheap hard drive is, read on to see how I built a 2.5″ portable hard drive for $9.99.

The first thing I had to do was figure out how to open up the case to the Jukebox so I could extract my hard drive.  Thankfully, a few years ago companies used to make their electronics in a manner friendly to DIY types like myself, and a small Phillips-head screwdriver was the only tool I needed. The front cover is just a metal plate that provided access to the battery without any tools via a small sliding release.  Once the battery was out I moved on to the plastic circuit board cover holding everything else inside.

There were four small screws holding the plastic cover, and then a few more hidden screws that actually mounted the circuit board to the metal bracket on the back of the unit.  But after that, my hard drive and Jukebox circuit board were both completely free from the enclosure.

The hard drive was plugged in pretty snugly to the header, so with some slow but careful and forceful pulling, I was able to separate the two without bending any of the pins.  Now that I had everything disassembled, it was time to see if the hard drive was even functional.  After all, it had been about five years since the thing had seen any power.  To test things out, I used a multiple-interface hard drive USB cable. One end of this cable plugs into just about any hard drive connection and the other end plugs into a USB port.

With the cable ready to go, I plugged it in and crossed my fingers. The drive spun up and sounded like it was functioning just fine, but it didn’t show up right away on the Windows XP machine I had plugged it into. To look into what was going on required some digging in the Windows computer management menus, accessible by right-clicking on the ‘My Computer’ icon and then selecting ‘Manage.’  From there, I went to ‘Storage’, and finally ‘Disk Management’.

the HDD interface cable

This brought up a list of all the storage devices that were currently connected to my computer. Fortunately, my drive showed up, but it was listed as ‘uninitialized’ with no tables formatted on the drive.

I right-clicked on the drive in question, then selected ‘Initialize’, and I was prompted with what file system I wanted to format the drive with.  I chose the trusty FAT32 file system.  After 15 minutes or so of formatting and then a quick copy and paste test, I was ready to find a suitable new home for my now functional hard disk drive.

What I wanted was a 2.5″ external HDD enclosure, and I found one from newegg.com for $9.99.  Once I opened up my new enclosure, I simply plugged in the drive into the header, and slid it into place.  Now this particular enclosure required two very small screws to hold the drive in place, and the screws actually go from the outside of the aluminum case and into the plastic header.  If you’re going to buy an external enclosure, I highly recommend looking for one that is either all metal, or one that doesn’t require any screws; because I can see this one wearing out if I swap drives in and out of it very often.

the 2.5" HDD enclosure with cardboard cushion

Perhaps another result of my poor purchase decision, after I had the drive in I noticed a little bit of rattle when I shook the enclosure.  To remedy this I just cut out a small rectangular piece of cardboard and placed it in between the hard drive and the case.  You could also use foam or some other soft material, but I had cardboard around and it worked just fine, resulting in a snug fit for the drive and case.

So, ten bucks and an hour later, I now have a 20GB portable HDD.  Now what should I do with it?  Check back for the next part of this article:  PortableApps.