I may have missed this somewhere in this forum.

Nobdoy has figured it out yet...

Is the boot up image the same whether you have the HDD installed or not?

If so then you're going to have to hack the flash memory that holds the OS and that's beyond me.

Cirbirus said:

Is the boot up image the same whether you have the HDD installed or not?

If so then you're going to have to hack the flash memory that holds the OS and that's beyond me.

I think I'll run down to the car and try it right now.

BRB.

Yes it's possible.

The startup screen is located in the LDATA partition, subfolders \BG\OPENING, file is OPENING.BMP.

It is a standard sized bitmap. Same as the background images I mean. 500x240.

I copied the ORCA.BMP to this folder and renamed it opening.bmp. It worked.

I now see tha head of a whale in the sunlight instead of PIONEER on startup.

I wonder if I remove the bmp completely if I'll see POST info?

This is my new startup pic converted to jpeg.

Very nice! That right there is enough for me to rip out my hard drive. I would love to remove that pioneer background and put in one that's the make and model of my truck.

That's great. Let me see if I get this right, and please forgive me as I am pretty computer savy but not a techie. I need to remove my HDD and have it unlocked for a about $40. Then hook it up to my computer (somehow), and change the startup screen .bmp to the new one. Then put the HDD back in and I'm done. I may have over simplified but like I said, not a techie. Is this right?

steve350f said:

That's great. Let me see if I get this right, and please forgive me as I am pretty computer savy but not a techie. I need to remove my HDD and have it unlocked for a about $40. Then hook it up to my computer (somehow), and change the startup screen .bmp to the new one. Then put the HDD back in and I'm done. I may have over simplified but like I said, not a techie. Is this right?

As we know today yes. Hopefully we will learn how to do things like this using CD-R's
Better summary than some techies.. :lol:

where do you have the HDD unlocked?

fred said:

where do you have the HDD unlocked?

You get a 2.5 inch to 3.5 inch adapter, you install the drive into your desktop machine and then load the software, register with an account, pay a license for the unlock, make sure you are online, run the software and unlock the drive.

Of course if you screw this up your Z1 will be a very expensive door stop. And as soon as you put the drive back in the unit it re-locks it. I think Pulp has disabled locking on his drive, I didn't have the guts to do it on mine, my replacement hard drive does not work in my Z1, still working on it.

Changing the boot up is a bit scary and dangerous and could render your Z1 useless, not sure if we have everything nailed down yet. And the procedure is not without risk and probably not ready for the masses.

Does this let you upload MP3s to your HDD, bypassing all of the security etc?

I have a bunch of Apple store music I'd love to have on my Z1.. Plus I heard the encoder quality is pretty low?

-dp

Anonymous said:

Does this let you upload MP3s to your HDD, bypassing all of the security etc?

I have a bunch of Apple store music I'd love to have on my Z1.. Plus I heard the encoder quality is pretty low?

-dp

"We" are working on it, first we need to see if we can get into the hard drive. We are having trouble getting "new drives" to work in the Z1 reliably. Someone will need to make computer software to convert the MP3's to AT3's or what ever the format the Z1 uses and create all the "extra" files it needs. If it was as easy as copy over mp3's to the drive, yes. But it's not that easy. We are working on it.