Digital Wanderer

My friend Andrey bought an iRiver H10 player with a 20GB hard drive. My buddy's careless attitude meant he only glanced at the specs, missing a highly crucial detail: the US version of the player works only with Windows Media Player 10, which, in turn, only runs on Windows XP.
Andrey, meanwhile, is a fierce hater of XP and WMP, using Windows Server 2003 instead. They brought him the player, we plug it in, and run into the player's complete refusal to interact with the computer in any way. My vicious grumbling, "I warned you!" somehow didn't solve the problem.
It turned out the player operates over the Media Transfer Protocol, a demonic invention of Microsoft. The evil monopolist corporation forced iRiver to screw users over and disable UMS. UMS = USB Mass Storage, meaning that magical thing that lets you forget the torment of CDRWs/other crap, stick a flash drive into the PC, and see it as a drive with a letter.
And the iRiver H10, while it does let you buy songs on Napster and other online joints at a very sweet rate, doesn't let you write/read arbitrary data files, only music, and even then, only in Windows Media Player via MTP.
We spent half an hour searching for some pirated firmware "to have it all," but found nothing. Then a grand idea struck my head to check how the poor Linux geeks are fighting this brutal bummer. Linux folks are smart people, even if they're unhinged fanatics. It turned out the iRiver developers went down a well-trodden path: they declared MTP support and a total ban on UMS per Microsoft's commandments, but left an elementary loophole. All it takes is to turn off the player via Reset, and hold down the "o" key while turning it back on. The player will enter emergency mode, and will be perfectly visible as a drive. Voila! Or, rather, deja vu, because Sony did exactly the same thing with its Playstation 2 and DVD regions.