Disklavier

Hey guys,

You might remember my ramble about trying to upgrade my 80GB HD to a much larger HD, for 3 reasons, 1 space, 2 improved performance, 3 fail safe/backup. (currently if you HD dies you wont have a piano until you send you HD all the way back to japan and they send a replacement for who knows how much $$ all the way back to your country).

Well I managed to finally sort out this issue!

I am not sure if people know this, but Yamaha only have 12 months warranty on ALL electric parts. While the actual piano might have 10 years.

My Disklavier MK4 is about 2.5 years now and as my PSU blew up I had to buy a new one about 2 months ago for $481 and Yamaha Australia did not care... so this means you won't void anything after 12 months.

So for those who want to upgrade their little 80GB HD and your piano is more than 12 months old then you have nothing too loose!

Anyway, enought of my winging ;)

To upgrade the HD you need to clone the HD with a good 'cloner' I had success with "PC INSPECTOR clone maxx" it runs linux also.

I used http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ it has lots of trendy things on this CD, I used the "PC INSPECTOR clone maxx" to clone the 80gb to my 500gb HD.

NOTE: I originally used ghost and other programs using sector copy & tired file copy but they caused errors when the MK4 booted. (PC inspector clone maxx worked)

So the next thing is to enlarge the partition.

I used a handy tool on the CD called " Parted Magic " this was excellent as it was linux to start with and would preserve various things, and the BEST part is it's all GUI so no stuffing around with random linux commands. With Parted Magic, you need to select the partition group first and expand that into the 'unused space' then you can expand the '/home' or /dev/hda9' into the unused space.

After 3 minutes and 20 seconds the /home was expanded!

I then installed my new drive into the MK4 box and all booted perfect, it booted faster and quieter, also the seek between tracks and recording and loading the radio was much faster.

I now have 390gb to play with! :-)

Just a note though, my new drive does run hotter so I chucked a nice quite fan on the side and it helped. Ofcorse you could get a 250GB HD as these are very stable and run cooler these days.

And lastly in my big ramble, I have my original 80GB hd in my cupboard all safe.

The last issue is RAM, I upgraded the 256meg DDR1 chip to a 512 DDR1 and after logging into the console and doing various tests, it seems yamaha cap the rams usage. (any linux people out there??)

Cya!

Philip


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