For Mac users who upgrade H140 hard drive

[gibson]

I have just upgraded the disk drive from 40 to 60GB on my ihp140.

After you have installed the drive (which is simple), the first thing you must do is connect the player to your Mac and format the drive using Disk Utility - most importantly, you must choose the MSDOS File System option. That should make it work immediately. When you disconnect your player from your Mac, it should even automatically recreate all the necessary folders you need to start with (Root, Record, Trash etc).

My only problem is the 1.65 firmware. It won't work, it didn't even work on the 40GB disk. So if anyone has any ideas about that please let me know. I am perfectly happy with the 1.63 (European) version for now, but it would be nice to know why the newer version isn't working. Thanks.

[NPswimdude500]

i'm going to add this thread to the HDD Upgrade FAQ, if you don't mind. full credit given of course...

[the_winch]

1.65 firmware with rockbox bootloader works fine for me.

This is what I did.

1. Start Disk Utility
2. Select the players drive (XX.X GB Toshiba ML...)
3. Select the partition tab
4. Change the partition scheme to 1 Partition
5. Change the partition name to something nice and makesure the format is Ms-Dos
6. Click the partition button and wait.
7. Copy files to the player as normal.

I'd recommend using the rockbox bootloader if your going to mess about with the drive. The iriver firmware can refuse to boot if it doesn't like the disk leaving you unable to get into usb mode. The rockbox bootloader will go into usb mode whatever state the drive is in.

[midiwife]

Hi, thanks to gibson for his/her post.

I've swapped my ailing 40G driver for a new 60Gb one from Scan.co.uk who I can heartily recommend. Mine cost me £111.00 including vat and delivery and it came the next morning.

The rubber surrounding the old drive is ever so slightly different in shape from the new driver but I've managed without serious problems. My main difficulty was getting it all back together again.

My biggest problem though was trying to see the new driver under WinXP. Partition Magic wouldn't have any of it and said it was 'locked'.

So I hooked it up to my mac and under disk utility I managed to erase the driver (which was seen no problem) as an MS-DOS format. Now when I look at it in Partition Magic it says BAD whereas my 120 machine reads FAT32.

However, the 140 (now 160) machine appears to be working just fine.

Now, hooked back up to a pc I'm transferring all my old stuff from my older HP120 with no problems. i.e., I can read from and write to my 140 machine.

I've got rockbox installed on both machines btw.

So one more converted iHP. So far so good.

[midiwife]

Hmm, now although it's working splendidly with the pc, it's not showing up on my mac's desktop when I plug it in. Very very odd. I have to load up disk utility to get it to be seen. That's with it running in rockbox mode. Plus, even if I have it running in the iRiver firmware then go into USB mode, it's still not mounting to the desktop.

In disk utility it comes up with the following mount point:

/Volumes/IHP-160

which is similar to my firewire drive which IS visible on my desktop.

It's frustrating because basically it means that I'm not able to get recordings off the iRiver onto my mac - yet.

Any takers on this subject???

[midiwife]

No, I'm just having a bad mac day. Restarted my mac and all's just fine and dandy!