whitelancerGTS

im from canada and we dont get the navi packge. but i just bought a CLARION PORTABLE TOUCH SCREEN GPS. its so sexy. under 500 CDN. so if any of u guys want it. i recomand that gps

kevin_

niiiiiiiiiiiice!

Psythik

I have a few more questions about the navi system:

1) So it can't rip from MP3 CDs, but can it play them?

2) Are the lines of text customizable for the Sirius input? If not, what are they set to? From a pic I've seen, it looks like it shows Artist, Title, and Composer (Which Sirius actually uses as a comment line...). Can someone confirm that?

3) What kind of sound controls are there? Is it just Bass, Mid, and Treble; or is there a built-in equalizer? Are there any kind of cool DSP controls?

4) How's the sound imaging from the driver's seat? Is it well balanced or does it sound like all the treble's coming from one tweeter?

5) Does anyone know the RMS wattages of each speaker and sub? Are the speakers of good quality, or are my Polk db 6500 components better?

6) Are there any pics of the amp(s) powering the system?

That's all I can think of for now...

mystick

Anyone knows how to take the hard drive out? If we can take it out we might be able to load music in there much faster by hooking it up to a computer as an external hard drive. What I would like to do is to ghost the drive and put the image on a bigger hard drive like and 80 to 100 GB.

Hawkeye

Yes, and um, no.

I have experimented with taking the drive out. You need a special tool, and I haven't been able to recreate it.

However I doubt it's going to be as simple as ghosting the drive to the newer one. I expect to find some pretty serious hex editing when you get into bigger drives.

Also, I'm pretty sure the drive is a 2.5" SATA. I know it's 2.5", but not 100% on the SATA aspect just yet.

mystick

Most likely it should be a 2.5" SATA unless they are still using 2.5" IDE drives. But hey, if Haykeye are able to recreate the tool and let us know how to get it out would much appreciate. By the way is the hd located behind the screen? It looks like it is.

You are right Hawkeye; I doubt it's going to be as simple as ghosting the drive to the newer one. But since I haven't seen anyone try to get the hd out and dissect it to see how it works. I'm very curious about it. If I could just find out how to get the hd out I would give it a try to find out how this thing works. I have an external drive adapter can be use to hook up to both SATA and IDE. I think it's worth a try. Anyway, are there any computer geeks here that could try and help us all out?

mgeneral

I would give it a shot, its probably some proprietary file system that a regular computer wouldn't be able to access. The only thing is I don't quite want to screw up my car that I haven't made a payment on yet.

Rabidhamster

can someone check their nav system and see if it has canada in it??? was just thinking I might be inclinded to send down the heated seats and mirrors bits .. for a nav sys trade.. LOL

thou it would be kinda pointless if it doesn't even have canada in it

SmoothdrJay

Hey another Nanaimoite! I assume you bought yours at Tom Harris Mitsu. Well, the sales guy told me that navi wasnt available in canada. But when talking to the parts guy, he looked it up and could have it ordered in. Its not cheap though, $700 for the dash piece, and $3000 for the navi unit.

I was considering just ordering the dash, as im thinking, but not sure, that i could get my panasonic dvd deck, to fit in the hole where the navi unit would go. The only problem is i lose the display for the hands free phone, and i would think the steering controls become useless too.

Rabidhamster

I haven't got it yet I'm picking mine up in sept.. but yeah from Tom Harris

I think I'm just gonna pickup an aftermarket navi and dvd setup.. just custom install/mould it into the car

I had pretty much already planned on some interior mods that would nuke most of my interior warranty to begin with

dsf3g

I've got the Nav unit and am really loving it. However I've got some comments/questions:

Comment: the interface for the Music server seems pretty brain dead to me. It just lists all albums in alphabetical order. I'd rather it listed by Artist and then let you select an Album after selecting the artist. My "fix" has been to rename all my albums with the Artist name first, followed by the Album name. So:

"Aqualung"

becomes

"Jethro Tull - Aqualung"

That way, I can at least see my albums in alphabetical order by artist. Much better. So far I've got 85 CDs loaded, and I plan to stop around 100. I will say that once you've got an album playing, it's really, really nice to be able to directly click the title of the song you'd like to hear.

Question: Anyone know how to enter addresses as Highway and Route Numbers? There's a place I want to go to that I know is at the intersection of US-40 and US-29 in Elicott City, Maryland, but I can't figure out how to enter the name of a Highway. Any clues? When I search for "40" I don't get anything.

slisir

For those who had questions about the NAV unit, and modifying it, I wanted to do the same thing.

The NAV HDD is right behind the screen, when you have the screen down, it actually is right there marked. You can pop out the plastic cover without breaking anything with a standard screwdriver. The hard drive itself is held in by 2 small hex screws. All you need is a hex set, which I had, you can get them almost anywhere, and then it slides out.

It is a Toshiba 30gb 4800rpm ATA Notebook hard drive. What I wanted to do, was replace the drive with a 60gb 7200rpm Notebook drive that I have, for more space and much faster load time.

So mystick, you were right, you can't just simply ghost the drive. Any computer will detect the drive as being there, but you can't actually see anything on the drive. This is because it has no partition table data and no MBR. So the computer doesn't know how to read the drive and what file system it is.

I use Acronis at work for doing hard drive imaging and cloning. Acronis doesn't even recognize the drive correctly when you try to make a backup image. It does see it correctly when you try to clone it. The problem is it errors out during the process when you try to clone the drive. Which you can continue even after it errors out, but when you stick in the new drive in the NAV, it says it tries to repair the drive, reboots and loops that over and over.

My guesses are two reasons it errors out. Either, it uses encryption or a special file system, that writes the data raw, so when the Ghost or Clone software copies over it doesn't know what to do after the data is just freespace. OR they purposely put bad sectors at certain spots on the drive, like DVD or Copyrighted CDs, making it so you can't just copy it over.

The NAV unit uses Gracenote, which makes the software for the music part of the unit, looks like they may have more then just the music part too, since there red background is all over the unit on all menus. I tried joining as a Non-commercial developer to see if I could find more info on a filesystem or encryption method, but so far doesn't look like they include that in the non-commercial part. That or another company handled the filesystem/encryption part.

So is there anyone out there that knows more about Data Recovery, Filesystem or Write Methods?

Sure someone that knows more then me can help us.



On a side note, I also tried using Unix, and just about every partition software I could get my hands on just to see if I could get more info on the drive. Only one that read it the most was Acronis.

kevin_

Sounds like the same thing they have in my LG notebook hard drive. The notebook has a one touch restore feature that stored the restore information on a hidden partition on the hard drive. I wasn't able to clone it when I replaced the hard drive with a larger one.

Like slisir, I tried every piece of software I could find, and while some would be able to see it as some type of partition or blocked off area, it would never be able to read/clone it.

I called LG tech support and they wanted to charge me $100 for them to do it to my new hard drive.

So yeah, no idea...

GTS_rider

when searching for a highway or route you should start with letters and then number.. example... for route 46 here in jersey,,, you search for "US46".... it took me a few minutes to figure it out when I first tried the nav...

edit: one way to find out the format on wich the nav lists an route name is by remembering to check current location on the nav when you are on that route... then it shows you how it looks at it...

Kwelity

Am I the only one that noticed the POI's and alot of the road information seems quite out of date???