iRiver H120/H320 HDD upgrade report

[Multiplex]

I've just fitted a pair of MK3006GAL drives to our H120 and H340 machines, presumably that makes them H130 and H330 (yes I know that technically 40GByte can be done if you can get the drives).

The OF would not touch either drive, so I used windows to do it.

I read lots of stuff about needing extra tools(Swiss Knife) to format the drives but I used XP (pro) and it happily formatted them as FAT32, too late I thought about allocation unit but the default was OK.

Interestingly the H320 with the new un-initiallized/partioned/formatted drive would not show up in XP, fortunately I'd had touble getting it open and did the H120 first - no problems with that, so I put the H320 drive in there to set it up and put RockBox on it.

In the H320 I noticed that there is a small adaptor PCB with a flexi to a ZIF socket on the mother board - has anyone buzzed this out (on a borcken player maybe) to see if it is the PinOut needed to use the more easily available ZIF drives? (Yeah - I thought of it too late - it's back together again now)

And lastly has anyone got any recomendations for enclosures/caddies for the old drives - there are some available for Hitachi drives but I can't find Toshibal ones (preferably in UK/Europe and not on eBay)?

[XavierGr]

1) I think that it is not necessary to format the disks from windows, if I am not mistaken the OF has an option to quick format the disk. Even if the disk is unformated it will let you go through the menu.

2) flexi to a ZIF socket? Never seen that before on my H140/H340.

3) Yeah it is hard to find them. So far I have found them only on eBay and some stores in the US. (Maybe in the Europe too but I am not sure) I am searching for one myself.

[scorche]

Meeing extra tools for the formatting comes from Window's restriction to 32GB.  As your drives were 30GB, you did not need those tools.

[Multiplex]

@XavierGr
1. the OF would not go near the disks as supplied, they needed initialising, then partitioning/formatting on a PC. I had hoped that the OF would do it all but the formatter just bombed out on both machines.

2. Should have taken a photo when I had it in bits - there's a right angle adaptor that the HDD plugs into, this then goes and meets the motherboard in one of those low profile flexi sockets. (from memory - I love my H320 too much to want to go taking it to bits again till I need to)

3. have ordered from eBay. Hong Kong, China and the US are good sources - there seem to only be two basic designs. There was a guy on there in the UK who blew up his H320, ordered a caddy from China to recover the stuff off the disk and sold it for more than it cost him ;-)

@scorche
Oops, that was a pretty basic miss on my part, too much time digging into the detail and I missed the obvious.

[XavierGr]

@XavierGr
1. the OF would not go near the disks as supplied, they needed initialising, then partitioning/formatting on a PC. I had hoped that the OF would do it all but the formatter just bombed out on both machines.

Yes, probably you are right, I never tried it myself (to format an unformated disk via OF) but it worked quite ok for me on some occasions that the FAT table became corrupt.