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Some time ago I bought an MP3 player iriver X20. Very nice player, very good sound quality, 8GB of space, it plays variety of music and video formats, has microSD slot and many more.

To put music on it you should use iriver 3 plus (a program by iriver to manage your music collection) but you can also put files directly, as you do with a pen-drive. And here is the problem:

After putting files on it, the player scans whole memory searching for new files and adds them to media library. But what if it cannot for some reason read the file? It hangs. The obvious way to solve the problem would be to delete the problematic file. But the USB support is turned on AFTER the library is build. And this way our player is bricked.

For some time there was no known way to debrick it. The only way was to give it to manufacturer. But some time ago someone posted a solution in the internet:

Open up a player (find 8 screws, not 6, 2 of them are on the left side of the player under the round stickers)

Gently take off a circuit board. (you need to access its bottom)

Find a memory chip. It is labeled like “samsung k9hbg08u1m”

Find chip’s key meaning start of pin numbering (small circle on the corner). There are 48pins. 24 on the left side (1-24) and 20 on the right (48-25) (chip’s manual can be found here: http://catalog.gaw.ru/index.php?page=document&id=11348; we are interested in page 4).

On the right side find pins 41-44 (find them as the second 4 pins from the chip’s circle key opposite corner)



X20 memory chip

Connect them together with some metalic wire (don’t touch two middle pins on the right side of chip, it is chip’s power supply).

Holding those pins together connect USB cable to player’s socket.

After a while player will show error on its screen, get metallic wire out of pins, and then the player will be available as flash storage on the PC.

Format flash storage with quick format.

Disconnect and assemble the player back.

Connect to PC and upload new music.

This method is tested and works perfectly. :)