Ironic that I'd come in here to post about my JB3 problems and find this thread at the top
Unfortunately Creative Tech Support broke my JB3 on Friday morning as I was gettin ready to walk out the door to my first of two festivals on back to back weekends. It was operating just fine, but for some reason I couldn't upgrade the firmware on it from 1.10.06 to 1.11.07 or 1.20.06 which would give me level meters. Still I'd gladly give up level meters for a working JB3. Well the guy tells me to enter rescue mode and remove the OS. I guess I am an idiot for listening to him and trusting the instructions e-mailed to me. So now with the OS removed, I still had the same problem I had to begin with: couldn't upgrade the firmware on it. With the firmware that was on it removed, now it boots up and says "firmware problem" then goes straight to rescue mode. So I had to pick up a pack of mini-discs
and head out to the festival.
Ran my UA-5>Optical>silver hockey puck. Took the software and the USB cable out to the fest and the festival promoter was nice enough to let me use his computer to try and re-install the firmware but no dice-same problem.
Oh and the coup de grĂ¢ce: the next Creative tech support guy I spoke to said they'd be glad to charge me to fix my JB3 for me since it's out of warranty.