There has been so much information about the hard drive that i am a little confused after reading all the posts.

Can anyone confirm or deny any of this?

1) we have established that you can unlock the drive, via the webpage tool mentioned in the sticky.
2) once the drive is unlocked and you edit the registry, you can then install and remove and power up and down the drive and it will not relock?
3) we can upload a different splassh screen image?
4)although we cannot upload mp3's directly, we can upload background images?

ok i think thats all im unclear about. If anyone knows for sure feel free to chime in, and thanks in advance.

silveradojeff said:

There has been so much information about the hard drive that i am a little confused after reading all the posts.

Can anyone confirm or deny any of this?

Sure, I will.

silveradojeff said:

1) we have established that you can unlock the drive, via the webpage tool mentioned in the sticky.

Yes, that works. I only did it with one hard drive, but it worked perfectly. I plan on doing it again with my new July unit I bought for testing.

silveradojeff said:

2) once the drive is unlocked and you edit the registry, you can then install and remove and power up and down the drive and it will not relock?

Technically it's not editing a registry, you are uploading new data and settings to the IDE controller on the hard drive with another tool and boot floppy. This I haven't tried personally (at least with the stock drive). I did this on a cloned drive which I couldn't get to work either, but at least the Z1 didn't lock the new drive on me. I believe 1 or 2 other forum members followed the procedure on the sticky and the Z1 did not re-lock their stock drives.

silveradojeff said:

3) we can upload a different splassh screen image?

Yes, you can. It's called OPENING.BMP I belive. On the LDATA drive.

silveradojeff said:

4)although we cannot upload mp3's directly, we can upload background images?

Yes you can, there is another folder on that drive with the stock background images, you can add bmp files to that folder and they will show up when you go to change the background.

silveradojeff said:

ok i think thats all im unclear about. If anyone knows for sure feel free to chime in, and thanks in advance.

No problem. But you have to unlock the drive and this is not without risk. So be careful.

Thatnks for the clarification. I think its worth the risk and the expense just to change that splash screen. I hate that thing lol I have been playing with several background images but you dont really see them that much, i mean if your map is up or a dvd or basically anything you just see that menu. if your just listening to music you can hide that screen and see your image though. But looking at that pioneer spash screen for however long it boots is a little annoying.

That's how I fealt too. $50 and now I have a Lincoln splash screen. And a whole collection of backgrounds I can load at will with no CD.

I got this for easy connection to the drive:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6812156101

Very handy.

I used one of these for the unlocking and the security removal:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6812203012

But then used the USB to IDE adaper for the file transfer... no need to open up my computer again and again.

DJ Machismo said:

I know what the first link is used for. I was under the assumption you could unlock using just the first. What is the need for having both of these connectors?

I know I'll eventually want to just go ahead and use this method, so I figure I'd get all the info I can on top of what the threads already contain.

-Litos

ducatiboy said:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6812156101

This is a recent purchase for me. You can take a 3.5inch or 2.5inch hard drive and convert it to an external USB drive. It's great for easy access to files on the hard drive when you don't want to permanantly connect the drive to the computer. But the the interface is USB. It takes the IDE interface of the drive and changes it to USB.

ducatiboy said:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6812203012

The internal Z1 hard drive is a laptop style 2.5 inch hard drive. It's interface is IDE, but most desktop computer's IDE interface is a different sized connector. This adapter basically changes the size of the Z1 harddrive's connector to the size a desktop computer would have. The big difference is that this adapter does not change anything but the shape of the connector. The 1st adapter changes the interface from IDE to USB. This adapter is IDE just makes it so you can plug your desktop's IDE cable into the laptop style drive.


I used to have just the IDE 2.5 inch to 3.5 inch adapter:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6812203012
The software tools for unlocking and such will work with this adapter.

But it's downfall is that if you want to connect the drive to your computer, you have to shut it down, pull cables out of it, let them dangle, restart your computer, make sure the bios sees the drives, etc... but you still retain the IDE communication with the drive.

This adapter:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6812156101
Is great for connecting the drive to a computer without opening it up, but I don't know (and don't think) you can unlock a drive using this adapter. Once the drive is unlocked with the other one, you can use this to access the data. Actually both can access the data or files off the drive, but this one you don't need to open the computer or shut down the computer to connect it. The problem with this adapter is that you probably won't be able to unlock the drive or disable the security features with this adapter (actually I don't know this for sure, I'm guessing it won't work, I have not tried it personally, but I would bet that it wouldn't work). And it's more expensive.

It's called OPENING.BMP I belive. On the LDATA drive.

OU, OU, OU, how about a: "Dummies Guide to Boot up Screen Hacking"?? hehehe
dont forget the all the links left on this topic...

um.. anyone.. anyone...