My Zune HD Froze and Won’t Respond to Any Key Press

Today on my car ride home from work, my Zune HD stopped playing in the middle of a song and the screen turned off. I keep it plugged in when I’m using it in the car so the screen stays on and I can see all the song details. For some reason, that I’ve yet to understand, it decided to stop playing.  Since I was sitting in heavy traffic, I tried a couple things to get it back on – like pressing power, or the volume buttons, but nothing seemed to work. I gave up pretty quickly and switched on the satellite radio for the rest of the drive.

Now, this has happened to me a couple times in the past. The device just stops playing and won’t respond to any button or screen taps. Sometimes the screen is off, other times it’s on, but locked shut. Usually, I can get it to respond inside of a minute and all is well.  But that wasn’t the case today. Nothing seemed to bring it back.

When I arrived at home, I plugged it directly into the wall thinking that something may have been wrong with the car adapter. Sadly, that didn’t make any difference, and at this point I started to fear that the device might be dead.

With things looking grim, I decided to head down the reset path. First up, was a forced reset and if that doesn’t work, it’s time for a hard reset back to factory settings. If both of those don’t work, then I might have to call support. I’m not liking this option, as I live in Canada and the Zune HD is not yet available here, which could lead to some problems with a support call.

To perform a reset on the Zune HD you need to press and hold the power button for about 10 seconds. The screen should then flicker and you will see the Zune logo appear and the device will start to boot.

To perform a hard reset of your Zune HD you need to follow these steps. Please note – this will whip all your content from the unit! First, press and hold the power button for about 10 seconds in the same manner as a regular reset. When the device finishes the boot cycle, press the volume or media button (the one on the left side of the device) and the home button (the one at the bottom of the screen). Keep these 2 buttons pressed until you see a message asking you to connect the Zune to your PC. You’ll need the latest version of the Zune software on the PC, once you connect the device, it will install the Zune software to the device and you will have a fresh new device again.

In my case, all I need to do was a regular reset and everything was back up and running. I wish I knew what went wrong and caused the crash. Thankfully it didn’t require a full hard reset.