MuVo and its Firmware

As I already said in a preious post, I want to say some words about how I updated firmware on my MuVo v200 (it's not really my - I bought it for my girlfriend 2 years ago, but now it is replaced with her new mobile phone, so she does not use the player anymore).

First of all, what made me to update the firmware: sometimes the device could decide that it does not want to play anything...and it really did not play anything :) It even could not find any tracks on a flashdrive, and after that even I could not find those tracks on a flashdrive :)

So that is why I decided to make an update... I went to the Creative site, found the downloads page, selected my player and than I was asked of the OS I am using. I use Vista, so I selected in in a list and there was no firmware updates found. Than I clicked "Back" and selected Windows XP for the downloads filter...and there it was - I could clearly see the list to the latest firmware for my player.

I downloaded the update and tried to install it on my PC, but installer said that my OS is not supported (BTW, the same as with my Creative SoundBlaster Live 5.1). So I decided to attach the player to my server (that is running Windows 2003 server). In this way I solved the Vista-problem.

Using the terminal connection, I was able to run the update. It started to search for the player(I have already plugged it into the USB), and in a second or two I have been warned that the player will be reset. I clicked the confirmation button, hoping that it would start updating the firmware, but the only chage, I got, was the following message: "Fail to locate recovery driver needed for firmware upgrading".

So now I had to solve one more problem - I did not know anything about the "recovery driver" and there was no instruction for the firmware update. After some investigations with Goolge and Far (I use it for all kind of operations with files :) ) I found out two things:
1) Firmware update software package already contained the required driver, but it did not install it
2) My player supports the Recovery Mode, and I can put it into this mode manually - after that it will start searching for the driver, mentioned in 1).

So, I unplugged player, pressed Play button and, while holding it pressed, attached the player to PC again. After 10 seconds of holding the play button (I found out about that here), new device was found - some unknown recovery mode device. I tried to install the driver for it, abandoned the automatic install and selected the driver, that was stored in a temporary folder where it was extracted by the firmware updater (in my case that was C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\WINDOWS\temp\CRF000\, but the updater should be running while you are installing the driver :) a bit tricky :) ). After I installed the driver for that stranger recovery device, I was pretty sure that now the firmware update should work correctly...and I was right - after I unlpugged and than plugged in the played again, I started the firmware update, it found my player, notified of it's reset, put it into recovery mode, updated the firmware and switched the player into the normal mode again :)

I think, next time, I will just go and replace the player with a new one, that is made by someone unrelated with the Creative company, instead of updating the firmware :):) If someone has the same problem with "Fail to locate recovery driver needed for firmware upgrading" and my post is too long and confusing - feel free to write a comment and I will give some step-by-step walkthough :)