Trouble installing new harddrive - firmware error C00D124F

[aowald]

Well, I spent the better part of the whole weekend trying to figure out a fix for this.  It seems unshakable.  The only thing I can think of to effect repair on the Zune is to revert to a 30GB drive.  I tried a whole lot:

Using the Virtual PC, I got the same errors as I did through my regular desktop, so I know the virtual PC is fairly good at reproducing a real environment.  I had Windows XP SP3 with all the updates possible via Windows Update.  I installed the 3.0.532.0 release, which attempted to update itself to the current software revision.  I cancelled it and started up a new virtual PC session, re-installing all the updates again, this time installing by just using the msi rather than the full blown installer, this seemed to work, but the Zune software would not that it couldn't update the firmware at this time due to either the network being down or some other error I can't recall, but I know it wasn't a networking issues since It could connect to the internet - this was just some convenient message that displayed perhaps due to the lack of a real accurate error message.  I also tried doing the firmware from another computer entirely installing the Zune software on that - still no change in the results. 

This bugs me that there's no solution out there.  I tried even setting my clock back thinking that maybe it was a programming/timing thing.  I had set my computers clock back to 2008 arbitrarily thinking that a time when there were no issues would .. cause no issues.  That didn't do anything.

I just don't know.  I did a bit more research online and found that many people are dealing with this issue and it's been going on for years.  It's a shame that Microsoft isn't doing anything about this to fix this problem.  I can't really imagine myself getting an iPod and there aren't any real good MP3 players out there that had the feature-set of the Zune.  The whole social aspect is still awesome, but I can't honestly see myself working on getting badges for listening to music at home as much as I do when I'm out an about.

If I haven't been able to figure out a method for resolving this issue, considering the number of people who have been experiencing this prior, I'll have to concede and wait for someone to come along to figure out a fix.  The terrible part of all this is that I bought new HDDs for my 2 Zunes thinking this would be an easy fix.  Ah well. 

Best of luck to those who deal with this, but more so continue to figure out a solid fix for this issue.

[aowald]

I'll add one more bit of info.  I feel pretty certain this isn't a matter of bad hardware, speaking specifically of motherboards.  To confirm this, I tried putting on my old faulty hard drive to test out a theory.  The issue with the drive is that the screen would go to black after boot-up.  An additional symptom is that it would click, indicating the drive was going bad.  On startup, the load bar would scroll from left to right, then the screen would go black and not load up the Zune GUI.  I choose to do the only thing I could do which was to format the entire drive.  After doing this, I tried to get the firmware re-installed since the drive, also a 120 GB drive, did work at one time in the past and worked well for a couple of years.  I got the same error as I did with the new drive.

It now makes me think that perhaps the software was not allowing drives that had been working well at one time to now longer work at all if they were not factory standard.  This drive that was working, despite its failing condition, DID work for a number of years.  Now after the format, it would not allow the firmware update to happen and registered as a 1GB drive.

It's not hardware if the space on the drive at one time was definitely showing the full 120 GB.

Just some info for anyone out there working to get closer to a resolution on this issue.