flux303

I can't wait to see how this turns out. Anyone know what the model number is for the existing drive? I'd be curious to see how many G's operating shock it can take. Most modern drives--especially laptop drives--are pretty forgiving unless you seriously abuse them, so I bet a good 2.5" drive would be a fine replacement.

Now if we could just get wifi up and running so my car can sync my music collection while it's parked in the driveway

User 111021

iTrader: (2)

Carputer!!!!!!!

Mike6mt

Thank god the drive isn't a Maxtor (there known for overheating and going out after several years).

Yeah and I would Ghost it as an image as well.

gno

lol...man u dudes are halarious. that definitly sounds like a good idea tho...would it be a safer shot to try an add an additional HD(carputer)...probaly not

Gyoza

Amen to that, Maxtor drives are total ****.

GregUMR

Ok time for an update. So I got my car. I've had it for about 10 days. I've been a bit pre-occupied with tint issues and licensing my car. I'm taking care of that today, so hopefully no more temp tags. I'm so waiting to be pulled over, I did 20% all around because I though it would look much classier.

This is my first weekend at home, so I think I might go and find that hard drive. Its obviously mounted in near the headunit, so hopefully its not in some horrible small japanese hands place.

Also, in the meantime, I've bought a 16gb A-data Speedy Compact Flash Card for 70 bucks. Sure beats buying a new i-pod and its so fast when I go to load music. Its instantaneous. I'll definitely try to find some time this weekend or the next to find the HD and take it out, thats the hard part. Everything else should be easy


Edit: I was reading a g35 thread based on this same idea. It looks like the HD is mounted in the headunit with a bunch of screws to remove it, albeit not too hard to do since taking off the dash is 6 screws and a clip and probably similar to the g37. The issue now is the QNX file system. I've never used it before, although it was used on the old cd-32 ( Amiga ) game system, and I have a friend with one of those. The thread has a link to a free QNX os you can load up in windows, so accessing the filesystem should be possible. As long as the HD is ghosted first, any screwups can be fixed by a quick and easy ghost backup. Either way, part of the mod I would do would be to mount the HD in the glove compartment box for easy access. That way you can use a cheaper HD with less temp/shock values that may die on you in 2 years or may last 10, but if it died you could easily replace. Ahh the options..

Only sucky thing is, if it uses QNX, loading mp3's onto it would be a chore only meant for the most techy computer users. Unless of course we come up with an inventive way around it.

Edit2:

Just a little info on qnx4 filesystem:

File systems are not part of the microkernel, making it easy to load and unload as needed. QNX defaults to the qnx4 file system, a proprietary fs similar to other POSIX file systems. It includes support for images for use in ROM, NAND flash, and NOR flash, with Execute-in-place capabilities. There is also a RAM-disk utility. Recently, QNX released ETFS, or the Embedded Transactional File System. Essentially, this uses atomic transactions to ensure there are no file corruptions as a result of power-outages or a crashing program. ext2, DOS / FAT12, FAT16, FAT32 , ISO9660, and Joliet are also supported. Notably missing are ext3, JFS, XFS, ZFS, and ReiserFS. Of course, NTFS is not supported. Sharing with other systems is still fairly easy; both CIFS (client) and NFS (client and server) work fine. Briefly, QNX used a Package File System that was more of a hassle than a help; support remains but it is no longer a mainstream solution.

dezicartel

hahahah just FYI Guys Maxtor is a subsidiary of Seagate, so both hard drives are coming from the same company

Gyoza

Same company, but still different drives. There is a reason Seagates come with a 5 year warranty and Maxtors still only come with 3 years.

GregUMR

Ok guys, I'm getting ahead of myself here but I just came up with some really interesting ideas while at work today

I read about the QNX-4 filesystem, as well as what QNX Neutrino ( the Real Time OS used by the nav system. In fact, QNX is the OS and it was customized by infiniti, or someone, to use the nav, flash cards, cds, mp3 ( gracenote software ) and access our ac/heating and other items like the gas mileage, etc ).

So, here is the deal. QNX is a POSIX type OS, meaning its not to different from the way linux works, albeit there are differences. The nice thing is, its setup much like linux with /usr, /boot etc on the hard drive. If I get the ambition to try my idea, I can safe gaurd any failures by first imagine the hard drive and then putting it in a safe location. I would then first try a bigger hard drive ( 80, 120 ) and put the image of the original hard drive on it. This should work flawlessly.

After that, the possibilities get really interesting. I'm not sure yet what processor is used (MIPS, ARM, Xscale, x86, etc) on the computer, but either way it will be able to run linux or a variant of linux. I could take the new hard drive, create a second 3 partition ( currently you have 2, QNX and mp3 storage ). I would then have to load up the /.bootloader file within QNX and I could easily add a line in there stating the start of the new partition and its physical location. Now when the system boots, it will give me the option to boot the QNX system like normal, or hit enter and boot from the other partition. Technically, if the up down left right enter arrows work, I should be able to do that. If I can, I can also configure the new OS and get to a desktop ( might take some interesting way of hooking up a keyboard ).


I know this sounds crazy, but its possible that we could dual boot linux and the standard nav system (QNX RTOS) and be able to select which one. So, you could load up linux and browse the internet using a EV-DO card from Sprint/Verizon, and also access your QNX files and add mp3's directly from the touch screen. You would just use the touch screen to navigate as linux supports touchscreens. Wouldn't that be really cool?????

So now I just have to get the ***** to do this. Its really low risk, all in all. Once I get the new hard drive working, I'll have the fallback of the original if I screw anything up on the new hard drive. How bad is it to void the warranty on a car owned by the bank??


You could even run windows if the processor supported x86. Here is the link talking about dual-boot on QNX.

http://www.qnx.com/developers/qnx4/q...html?code=4123

From the QNX Neutrino RTOS specifications:
"Maximize application portability with extensive support for the POSIX standard, which allows quick migration from Linux, Unix, and other open source programs"

I did a lot of embedded c programming and embedded systems works while in college, so I'm pretty comfortable doing this sort of thing.

bboysteele

^^^Good research Greg. I hope you get to try this soon. I will be a little to busy with school to attempt this now but hopefully you are successful and you write up a detailed process on how to do the upgrade.

xdram

Sounds neat. I think it’s possible but it’s way to cold for me to even think about sitting in my car trying anything. I did bring my nav into diagnostic mode and noticed an option to initialize the hard drive. That caught my eye and I selected it, it prompted a warning saying all user data would be deleted. I’m wondering... Would it be as easy as replacing the HD with a larger one and running through that option? I wonder if it formats and copies an image to the drive so the system could use it. I think there’s a very good chance of it... I just have to figure out how to get to the hard drive carefully.

Your dual boot idea is awesome, I’d like to be able to boot to Windows so I can run PDANet so I can link it to my Treo via Bluetooth and get Internet. But that might be unlikely, we’ll see...

GregUMR

Ok, where did you find out how to get into diagnostic mode on the nav system??? Let me know I want to explore that for sure. Thats a very intriguing find.

I think you may be right about it initializing a new drive, but the question is, how would it store 18gb of nav data and then copy it to the new drive? I think the only way it could do that would be to put a small image onto the drive and the download the rest, which seems unlikely. That or it has 2 drives!


Edit: apparently this is how the diag. mode is accessed.

"Press the BACK switch and the "UP switch of the 8 direction switches" within 10 seconds after turning the ignition switch from OFF to ACC and hold them for 3 seconds or more. The buzzer sounds, all indicators of the preset switch illuminate and the self-diagnosis mode starts"

also after a bit more thought, I imagine the intialize hard drive option is just basically a hard reset. So, for instance, you would just reset user data, not be able to re-install on a blank drive. I'm pretty certain the OS for the nav system is contained on the hard drive, not flash memory or rom, so if thats the case, you won't be able to just put in a blank hard drive. However if the OS is contained on flash memory or rom, that would open some more possibilities.

peterbanks

iTrader: (4)

Access Diagnostic Mode

ghideon

iTrader: (1)

Most likely the OS is on one partition, and the user data is on another.

So, if you went for the low hanging fruit, you could take your image of the 30GB HDD, shove it on a 300GB HDD, and then resize the user partition.

It works on Linux, as I've done with my work laptops before to get them to dual boot Windows/Linux. The question is do they have any kind of safeguards built in to prevent this? IE, does the QNS OS look for a certain partition size?

Like I said before, it looks non-trivial to me (and of limited value IMO). But I do wish you luck.

GregUMR

Yeah, I think the part about having 80gb of space for music so you can directly add mp3's is only 1 of the cool things possible. Its not quite needed since I have a 16gb CF card. However, the dual boot of linux and using my sprint evdo broadband card on my car so I can have fast internet browsing with touch access from my nav screen, would be very sweet and have a lot of possibilities..