My old Rio Karma died mid-shuffle and I actually teared up
Found my Rio Karma in a drawer last week, the one with the weird docking cradle that always threw errors. Plugged it in after like 15 years and it actually turned on, showed my old playlist names. I got maybe 6 songs into a shuffle and then the hard drive started clicking real bad, then nothing. Tried the recovery disk I still had burned on a CD-ROM and of course the software barely runs on Windows 11. It's officially gone. I know it's just a dead MP3 player but that thing went through two deployments with me and every song on it was loaded one at a time over USB 1.1. That's like 20 minutes per album. Feeling weird about just tossing the whole unit. Anybody found a way to salvage files off a Karma with a dead drive, or is it really just a paperweight now?