Hi. This question goes out to anyone who knows how to fix a hard drive. I have an mp3 player that has a fujitsu 40GB hard drive in it. A while ago i dropped my player and afterwards it would not start up and i heard a rattling inside. So, i peeled back all of the "Warranty Void If Broken" stickers and took a look inside the hard drive. It seems fine and I got my mp3 player to turn on again, but now there is constant freezing, i can hear the arm of the hard drive clankingwhen it is not spinning, and in order for me to turn it off, i have to take the batteries out of the player. This is my third player of the same model(ive had other problems and got new ones because of the warranty) and i am begining to get frustrated with it. If there is anything that i can do fix it and for once keep all my data, it would be much apreciated. Thank You. -P.

Well it sounds like you've voided your warranty, and their are no user fixable parts in there, and it sounds like the hard drive is indeed soon to depart this world. You can avoid many of these Windows problems with Linux. Linspire eases the transition for new users

If you opened up the hard drive it will never work again. Hard drives MUST only be opened in a 'Clean Room'. A smoke particle getting in the drive will destroy it.

No hard drive can stand the impact of being dropped. To minimize the impact you could keep your player in a shock absorbing sleeve. In theory you could replace the hard drive. However how are you going to get a copy of the software to install the parts of the operating system on the drive. I assume the other parts are in ROM. I think it is now salvageable only for parts.

It seems to be working fine now after i cleaned the disk off a little. It is still a little slow at skipping to a new track while another is still playing, but i can live with that as long as it still plays. I may think about getting a new drive from newegg and downloading the OS from the companies web site a little later, but for now i am satisfied. Thank you all for you help. -P

"It seems to be working fine now after i cleaned the disk off a little. It is still a little slow at skipping to a new track while another is still playing, but i can live with that as long as it still plays. I may think about getting a new drive from newegg and downloading the OS from the companies web site a little later, but for now i am satisfied. Thank you all for you help." You can't "Clean" the disk of a hard disk drive. The space between the head and the disk is about 10,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair, a finger print is several hundred times larger than the gap between the head and disk. As soon as you opened the cover, you wrecked the drive. A dust particle is also several hundred times larger than the gap between the head and disk (a dust particle is actually larger in relation to it, but i'll keep it simple). So as soon as ONE dust particle got on the disk, it's done. Even if it works now, it won't work for very long.