Creative ZEN information

About

• Link to forum thread

Information about the Creative ZEN

Recover from a bad flash

To recover from a bad flash, turn on the unit while holding the play/pause button. The Rescue mode will start up, and you can erase your bad firmware, and from there, reload the original(providing you have a PC, and the update program).

Firmware format

Using ZenUtils (see SVN for a newer version), I extracted these files from the updater program made available by Creative:

• ZEN_PCFW_L22_1_21_01.opt (this is a ZenUtils specific file)
• ZEN_PCFW_L22_1_21_01_rk.bin (this is the main Firmware)

Further file extraction, again using zen_utils, yields:

• ZEN_PCFW_L22_1_21_01_rk_0xa9544c20 (this is the actual main Firmware)
• ZEN_PCFW_L22_1_21_01_rk_CINF
• ZEN_PCFW_L22_1_21_01_rk_FRESC (this is the rescue mode firmware)
• ZEN_PCFW_L22_1_21_01_rk_HCreative_S.TTF
• ZEN_PCFW_L22_1_21_01_rk_HCreative_T.TTF
• ZEN_PCFW_L22_1_21_01_rk_HDeviceInfo.xml
• ZEN_PCFW_L22_1_21_01_rk_Hdevicon.ico
• ZEN_PCFW_L22_1_21_01_rk_Hdevlogo.png
• ZEN_PCFW_L22_1_21_01_rk_Hjukebox2.jrs
• ZEN_PCFW_L22_1_21_01_rk_Hjukebox.grs
• ZEN_PCFW_L22_1_21_01_rk_Hsplash.jbm
• ZEN_PCFW_L22_1_21_01_rk.mk (this is a ZenUtils specific file)
• ZEN_PCFW_L22_1_21_01_rk_NULL

TylerLaing

For more information about the firmware format, see this.

Pictures

• There is one scan available (mirror).
• Another scan (mirror)
• Anythingbutipod.com page about Creative ZEN disassembly
• epiZENter.net thread about opening up a Creative ZEN (you'll need an account to view the pictures)

Components

Links

• CreativeZVMPort: contains a lot of information regarding the whole Zen line
• NewPort: contains information about starting a new port
• SigmaTelSTMP3xxx: information regarding the chipset