Handtops, UMPC - So You Want A 60Gb HD In Your UX180P -

Follow-up Five Days Later:

A follow-up... a few days after the drive upgrade, I'm thinking I might be on to something with an observation I made. Namely, I commented on the gap between the original drive and fan/chip and how that gap was removed with the drive upgrade and whether or not that would affect the device. Well, interestingly I've noticed three different times now that my CPU seems to always be on... granted at a lower level, but on more than it was before the drive upgrade. Case in point, before the drive upgrade, I used my UX in a very quiet room and almost never heard the fan. Yesterday, I did the same thing, but could hear it constantly in the background. Now, on my desk at work, I'm hearing it as well. And while not hot, its definitely warm, and warmer than it used to be (though nothing near the heat of my OQO). It would seem I might have made a trade-off of battery life for extra disk space as we all know that the battery life will be diminished if the fan is being used more...

I spent a good portion of the weekend replacing the stock 30Gb drive in my UX180P with a 60Gb (Toshiba Mk6008GAH). I hit a few rough spots along the way, so I thought I'd save some others the trials.

I used this link as my reference:

link

This was a UX50, so there were some minor differences compared to the UX180P (namely the UX180P has the Cingular EDGE radio), but the major one was listed in the comments below the article at jkontherun (see number 5 below).

1) The screws... these guys are a pain. I bought two different mini screwdriver kits at my local Fry's and none of the 11 screwdrivers I ended up with fit correctly. However, I was at a local Brookstone this weekend and found their "Precision Tookit"

link

This turned out to be perfect with all the right philips heads and even the tweezers that came in handy.

2) The external case screws came out easily enough, though it should be noted that you need to A) remove the stylus to get to the middle screw and B) when removing the flap that covers the screw, you simply lift it up slightly, then pull it straight out (not upwards, but parallel to the UX). The five inner screws around the hd were a pain. Eventually I figured out they were lock-tighted and simply would not come out easily without stripping the heads. The solution proved to be screwing them in more (tighter) just slightly (about a quarter twist) and then they backed right out with no strippage of the heads.

3) The images included in the UX50 change-out seemed to lack the external drive shock mounting. My 30Gb drive was in a whitish, rubberish casing that had to be somewhat pried out of the casing. It wasn't adhesive, but clung to both the drive and the case like really good rubber cement. It took a little work to get it out smoothly. Related, there was a large black square of protective material and a smaller one near the drives connectors. The UX50 article didn't mention these (it only mentions the electric strip for the shock sensor), so perhaps they don't exist in the UX50. Nonetheless, they exist to prevent shorts between pieces of metal, so they should be moved over and lined up correctly.

4) The 60Gb Toshiba drive is noticably larger (thicker) than the stock 30Gb drive. Immediately under the stock drive is the CPU cooling fan and a chip (that's not the CPU itself). I decided to measure things with a micrometer. In short, the stock 30Gb drive, when wrapped in its white shock-mount housing, has a gap of about 2mm between the drive and the fan and chip. The 60Gb drive is 3mm thicker, so when you put it all in, the metal covering for the drive doesn't sit perfectly... you must screw it in to get it all the way in and in so doing, the drive makes full contact with the chip under it. I have no idea whether a gap or airflow is needed, but adding the 60Gb drive seems to remove any airflow option that previously existed. Still, I haven't noticed any heat issues, nor has anyone posted about any, so it should be fine. Nonetheless, its something to watch out for... if you find your fan on all the time or the unit heating up and you did the 60Gb upgrade, you might want to give this some thought. Related, some users mentioned the slide up screen scraping their keyboard keys. I'm curious if they have the 60Gb upgrade as I'm curious if the extra internal pressure from the 1mm net loss would push the keypad out further and make it more susceptible to scratches from the sliding mechanism? I doubt it, but again, something to consider.

5) This is the one difference between the UX50 HD upgrade article and my UX180P due to the UX180P having the EDGE radio... after removing the six case screws, you simply the rock the case a bit and the back lifts right off. However, on the righthand side (assumes the unit is screen face down with the headphone jack facing you), you will get some resistance. It turns out there is an antenna wire from the EDGE antenna to the circuit board and its taped down. The trick is to lift the side slightly, then pry up the tape (use something plastic, not metal... I used a filed down chopstick). Rather than lift one side of the tape and free the cable, lift both sides of the tape, leaving it laying on the antenna cable. You should now have enough slack to set it aside and work on the HD. When you're ready to put everything back together, line everything up, then poke a small object into the case's USB port hole and guide the antenna wire into place before snapping everything together.

6) The HD connector was the biggest challenge to me, but only because I've never used a drive with a ZIF connector before. The above mentioned UX50 article said "you can un-latch the hard drive by gently rotating the black latch that sets the hard drive loose". This made absolutely no sense to me. Looking at the connector, it resembles other connectors where you just slide the cable into the slot. I had to look at the new drive and realize that the little black, plastic doohicky on the connector actually moves... it moves down to lock the cable into place. So here I figured out that I needed to gently lift it up on the 30Gb drive and sure enough, the cable slid right out. Installing the new drive was pretty much the opposite.

The remaining items I encountered are all software migration related, but I'll post them for those that might benefit... I didn't opt for a fresh install. Instead, I used Acronis TrueImage to do a "full backup" of both the 6Gb system partition and the 22Gb data partition to a remote network share. It took roughly 6 hours to make the archive, another 1 or so to change out the hard drives, then about 6 hours to restore the data to the new drive (choosing to expand the new volume to the full space allowed). [going to an external, USB or firewire drive would've been a lot faster, but I had constraints in both these areas... so I did it to a remote network share, but since both systems are connected wirelessly, it was almost painfully slow]. The catch is that I only restored the data partition, not the system partition. After restoring and rebooting, I got an error that Windows couldn't boot properly. I tried an XP Pro CD and the recovery console. I tried all the options... including the "fixboot", "fixmbr", and "diskpart" options (the first two errored out). Unfortunately, I knew the problem, but I couldn't resolve it via the recovery console. The problem is the system partition was seen as partion 1 and the data partition as partition 2. But since I restored only the data partition, Windows was reading the boot.ini and looking for partition 2, when it needed to be looking for partition 1. And most unfortunately, the XP Pro recovery console doesn't allow you to use the "edit" tool to edit the boot.ini file manually. I even tried booting from an old Win95 boot disk... it booted and the "edit" tool worked, but it wouldn't see my 60Gb NTFS volume, so again I couldn't edit the boot.ini. In the end, I remembered seeing an error on a PC at work that said "Invalid boot.ini... booting from C:Windows" and I know in the case of that particular PC that it completely lacks a boot.ini file. So with nothing to lose and knowing I could always restore the volume again, I used the "delete" command of the recovery console, deleted the boot.ini, then rebooted. Sure enough... I saw the "Invalid boot.ini... booting from C:Windows" error message and then was in XP (though it required a chkdsk and said it had found new h/w [the new drive] and needed to reboot). After the reboot, I created a new boot.ini and now I have a working system with no errors at boot time.

Below is my original boot.ini:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn

And here's the new boot.ini:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn

Notice that in the first one, its looking for "partition(2)" which makes sense as the 6Gb system partition was the first partition. In my revised boot.ini, it looks for Windows in "partition(2)" as there is no system partition on my new 60Gb drive.

I sincerely hope this helps the next person that decides they want to try this upgrade. Also, for what its worth, I got my 60Gb drive for only $110.00. I shopped around and found the best price to be around $180 with an average of around $220. But then I saw a description for the drive when searching for the part number (MK6008GAH) that it can be used to "upgrade the 5th generation iPod". So I went to Ebay and searched for "new 60Gb iPod" (I didn't want a used one for obvious reasons) and found one for $110 + $15 shipping from someone with 1000+ positive feedback. It arrived new in box four days later, so it will soon have a 30Gb drive in it...