Has anyone taken the harddrive out and examined it yet? I need to know if the file system is proprietary or is it FAT16 or FAT32, NTFS(doubtful), some flavor of linux/unix (more likely). I would really like to replace mine with this....

http://www.addonics.com/products/fla...ad44midecf.asp

add a couple of 8gb CF cards and make it accessible externally (thorugh glove box or something). It would be a lot easier to hack this way if you could pull the cards, make changes, plug them back in and see what happens. Then you have the harddrive as a backup.

 

Harddrive?

I thought you meant "has anyone taken the car to WOT"

 

Go experimenting... you sound like you have the know-how, let the rest of us know what your able to accomplish!

 

Im skeeeeeeeeered.

 

that's a cool idea there, tex

 

Actually, I think the system has a 30G Seagate ST930813AM. It could be swapped out with a 50G Hitachi N4K50 for about 30G of available music box space and about the same temperature/vibration specs. IMHO the overall system isn't drive speed sensitive enough to need a flash drive.

Because it's really just a 2.5" pata drive, you <i>could</i> use a normal laptop drive. Just count on replacing it every couple of years. This would give you 120G (100G for musicbox) for about $70.

I peeked at the service manual entry for replacing the computer. It requires ripping the whole dash apart. IIRC the manual doesn't have anything about getting to the actual drive even once the computer is out.

I'm too chicken to fiddle with this right now. Only 180Mi on the car so far.

 

I wasn't really concerned about the speed or temp/vibration specs. I wanted something that would be easily hot swappable and easier to work with on a laptop or desktop without popping hard drives in and out.

 

Actually, the hard drive that is used is 30 GB Seagate EE25 (Extreme Environment) Series hard drive. Link


Like you mentioned, the Service Manual mentions NOTHING whatsoever regarding how to remove the hard drive. Basically the entire AV Control requirements replacement if the hard drive fails. Because of that, something tells me it's not an easy job. But who knows? I just no I'm definitely not fiddling around with it and chance voiding my warranty.

 

If you do take the system apart, you could probably use a pata cable to put the drive someplace a little more accessible. The only time you should need to actually put the drive on your computer would be to load it up with a new set of mp3s.

 

Same thing I think. The ST930813AM is the specific drive in the series that goes in the G:

http://shopper.cnet.com/hard-drives/...html?info=user

 

I'm not scared...

The only reason I haven't done this is because I haven't had the time. I get home and it's late and dark and I don't feel like spending an hour in the car taking things apart -- really carefully, no doubt

If I take off one of these days or I work from home I might try to spend the time on it.

 

Gotcha, it definitely looks like the same thing.

 

i doubt this hd runs on anything like fat16/32 or ntfs for that matter. Im guessing the easiest way to find out would be hooking up to your pc (assuming the ide's are the same), and running the cmos/bios utility. Not all system bios's tell you what the drive is formatted with but i know my asus motherboard does tell me. I know that this sort of HD is very delicate and is not the kind you buy in staples lol.

Your guess with linux or unix is probably on point.

 

i don't think delicate is the right word. this harddrive is a more rugged model than you or i have in our PCs. that said, you certainly wouldn't want to throw it into a wall to test the validity of "2Gs of shock withstand".

my bet is on a *nix variant of file system. you should easily be able to make a ghost of the HDD to store on your PC, then purchase the 80G version of this drive and restore the ghost onto it. the only question is, does the Infiniti software on the HDD recognize space above 30G?

 

I hate all this speculation about what the hard drive is or does... it's ridiculous.

Took me 10 minutes to go outside and take the damn car apart... if it wasn't so late already I'd take the whole unit apart and mess with the hard drive, but I gotta drive the car to work tomorrow

I'll post pics in a minute.