RNS-510 HDD replacement/SSD swap DIY

[Idle]

I've not as yet looked at the hard drives used in the RNS510 so can't be certain if it would work (I'd expect it to,) but rather than doing a re-install my first thought when doing this would be to look at cloning the old drive to the new SSD and then adjust the partition sizes to suit.

There's no reason the map partition should ever exceed 10GB and very likely about half that would suffice.

There are free disk clone programs on the 'net (HD-Clone, for instance) that should cope, and the drives are small enough that even the late, lamented Partition Magic (still around in Torrent files, I think) should comfortably handle the task.

For those with a copy of Acronis Disk Director (usually under $50 online) the task should be a doddle.

[johnc]

It's a proprietary format though. If you think you can tackle it, I'd love to hear how you get on with it. You'd be the first in the world to succeed and many have tried. That said, I've not thoroughly researched it, so there may have been some more recent progress.

[Idle]

As I said, I've yet to see one (don't do enough driving these days to be worth putting anything on my RNS HD.)

[johnc]

Well done John! It's good to see the threads like this one.

It is stickie.

Thanks. :thumb up:

Yeah, it's something I'd be interested in knowing too. My personal CD collection is 70GiB as VBR MP3's. So I'd be happy to do this mod and use a 128GB SSD even. But to spend that money, and then have it potentially auto partition with a 40GB map partition and 80GB music parition would be frustrating... or even worse, if the new firmware is paritioning in 3 and you only end up with half the space as mentioned above, then I still wouldn't have enough space for my entire collection, which makes this mod pointless.

Like i mentioned, the 64GB version is the only smart cost vs gain upgrade. The 128GB isn't worth the money (at least for now), and the space wasted by the auto partition is just too great. If there have been other FW hacks for video in motion, maybe we'll see partition resizing hacks. No idea.

If you've got 70GB+ which you always want at your disposal, an MDI is still the most practical upgrade. I've got 360GB+ of music, so it has to go on a USB drive. It's all kind of pointless though as that's 128 days of continuous music without repetition. I've not spent anywhere near that amount of time in my car in nearly 4 years of ownership! A decent and fast drive with your favourite albums along with a 32GB SDHC card is faster and more efficient than MDI.

[Corey_R]

It's not so you can listen to 128 days of music... it's so that you can listen to whatever you feel like listening to when you wake up in the morning

[Preen59]

VERY well documented. Very cool. Thanks, John!

[kamold]

The file system in use for the music partition is marked as 'Vienna Flash File System'.
Never heard of this and a cursory glance over a few articles doesn't reveal anything useful.

Anyone have any experience of it?
It doesn't appear to be encrypted just not known by most partition tools. I can read the directory names of my music folders directly from the disk in a hex editor eg acronis disk editor.

I manually resized this partition by changing it's end cylinder/head/sector in the partition table after shrinking the nav FAT32 partition and moving it to the end of the drive.

Annoyingly although the FAT partition can be read properly in it's new location on the disk and the RNS510 starts up and runs fine, it still only sees ~40gb available space for music.

Will do some more research into this, there has to be some sort of 'nix tool that could manipulate this or it could be done by directly editing the blocks on disk however this is beyond my meager skillz in this area.

[kamold]

Ok so trying to change the partition sizes after the fact seemed like it wasn't the best way to go.

I changed the approach and tried modifying the firmware load files instead. Went down a few rabbit holes and did multiple loads/recoveries but....

Happy to report that after some faffing about and a few coasters to show for my very low skill in scripting I have successfully modified the partitioning scheme! I now have 90% for partition 1 and 10% for partition 2 (map data).



From the 64gb SSD that gives me 53gb instead of 40 under the default 67/33 scheme of the oem setup.



I did a lot of mucking around before understanding what i was doing so I will need to retrace my steps before posting instructions.

[Corey_R]

This is awesome news kamold. I look forward to seeing the instructions. Maybe a 120/128GB SSD might be on the cards for me....

... just one question... where the frak do you get PATA SSD's ?

[johnc]

Great work kamold.!! Look forward to seeing how you managed it. There's going to be a bunch of very happy people.

You can get PATA SSD's from ebay. That's where I've bought the 3 i've installed from.

[Corey_R]

Coolies.... so this one for example.

That appears to be the 128GB version of what you used in your first post. Is it the same seller?

[kamold]

Yeah looks like the same one. I don't know if anyone has confirmed that a 128gb drive will work but my guess would be that it will (I remember a 127gb drive support limit for the ata controller on 440bx pc boards so this may be similar in worst case).

You can adjust the ratio at will (in theory holds true for 3xxx firmware so could do say 80/10/10 partitions for the newer Firebolt 40gb drive layout)

I'd say go for it and would have gone for a 128 myself if they were a little cheaper

[johnc]

The 128GB does work. Someone in the US or Europe (can't recall) that came across my thread on another forum did the 128 and it worked fine. Just partitioned poorly as I'd expected.

That's not the same seller, but it's the right spec. Mine was from creatworld, but I'm sure there's no real difference. That's the same brand too.

[Corey_R]

Coolies. So creatworld have a 128GB PATA SSD for ~AU$252 delivered. Much better priced than the first one I found.

[johnc]

That'll work.