DISCLAIMER: ok, if you’re not familiar with these, this is where i basically say don’t do this.
The information expressed here is for eductational purposes only. I do not endorse or condone any activity and am in no way responsible for any reprocussion of any action taken in any way related to the information presented here. In short: do what you want with your stuff at your own risk. It’s not my fault if you screw up. If you question it, DON’T DO IT.
OK, got that out of the way. Now I bought an iAudio M3 and I love this device. It’s made by Cowon. The cool features i got it for was ogg play back (besides mp3, flak, wav, wma, and i think one or two more), excellent sound, voice recorder (used it at a conference to record it), small design, long battery life. you can see it’s full stats on the stats page. I love my player.
My problem was that i chose to go cheap and bought the 20 gb version. It didn’t take me that long to fill the hard drive and now i’ve started to become annoyed that everytime i buy a cd, i have to delete an old one. so i decided to see about upgrading the hard drive (if you don’t want to waste your time, i didn’t test a new hard drive because of price). step one should have been looking up the price of a new 1.8 in hard drive, but of course i didn’t do that first. my step one was getting the player open.
NOTE: your warrenty will be void if you open the case. i really don’t suggest this unless you have VERY good reason
the case is held shut by four VERY small screws on the back. after searching for a small enough screw driver (got mine open with a phillips number 0), the screws were easy enough to remove. note the ones on the botton are shorter than the ones on the top. after removing the screws, the back plate is very easy to remove (just don’t lose the screws). And when you look inside, you can see something like the poor picture below (it was a very low resolution camera that didn’t focus right) [you can find good pictures of the boards on the iAudio port of RockBox page (link below)].
as you can see, the hard drive is sitting right there. the problem is getting it out. that is more challenging that it might appear. on the left side of the image, you can see another circuit board (from now on called the daughter board). this is what is in your way and getting it out is not an easy task. there is one screw holding it down (the hold is outlined in red in the picture), but that’s not the challenge. to take the board out, remove the screw, then very carefully lift the left side of the board (if the player is sitting with the bottom towards you, the bottom of the daughter board if you are looking at it in the picture) first and slide it slightly towards that side of the case after the connector on the bottom is loosened. you have to get that wheel out (you will probably have to bend the plastic of the case to get it through.
from here, the procedure becomes reletively obvious: remove ribbon cable from hdd, slide hdd out. NOTE: 1.8 in hdd’s cost a hell of a lot. i did NOT install a new one, though in theory, you should be able to have the jetConsole reformat the drive properly for use. I have not confirmed this.
when you are done, put everything back in reverse order and make sure the daughter board connector (it’s right under the foam padding on that side) is pressed together. I actually fixed my busted back light by doing this and have no problems afterwards, but you must be careful.
Well, what about hacking firmware? I have yet to do this for there is only one project that i know of that has an interest in this. that is RockBox.org. They currently have their firmware running on a bunch or archos players and a couple iRiver players. an associate confirms that the iRiver port works nicely. currently, there is no iAudio port that is ready, but you can keep checking up on it at the iAudio port page. As soon as it’s ready, i’ll play with it.
Hopefully that will give you enough to think about and if anyone has done more or wants to contribute, please leave comments.