Broken Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen Question

I'm trying to fix my player and my computer can't distinguish partitions in the data ... can anyone help?

I've got a Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen player (from late 2002) that is no longer recognized as a drive when plugged into a computer. There is one corrupt file (the player's battery died while ripping a CD) and the player gets stuck re-loading the full library when turned on.

The tech support crew tells me the player is done for, but I'ld like to retrieve the data. I took the player apart and hooked up the hard drive to a slave bus in a machine running linux. Unfortunately, the computer couldn't find any partitions and I couldn't retrieve the data.

Anyone know how to help get my computer to read Creative's data? Their tech support crew won't offer any suggestions.

thanks!
dmaxcook