I know this has been talked about but I cant find if this has been done yet?
Sorry if this has been posted before. Has anybody been able to change the startup screen?

aj said:

I know this has been talked about but I cant find if this has been done yet?
Sorry if this has been posted before. Has anybody been able to change the startup screen?

Just PULP_FICTION. He changed his to the ORCA.BMP. Feel free to do a search for ORCA on this forum. I'm minutes from testing it myself, but I tried it earlier and I ended up with a Z1 that wouldn't boot up. So it's not for the faint of heart.

just finished and I DID change my boot up image.

It will cost you at least $50 and you get one shot at it. You will need a 3.5 to 2.5 drive adapter and a utility to unlock the drive and put it in a desktop computer. I have been working on it for the last 4 hours. Really not for the non-IT people.

Damn, that's an awful lot to go through just to change the startup screen. I would love to change mine, but not sure it's worth 50 bucks and 4 hours of my time. Plus the chance of FUBARing my brand new Z1. I'm not faint of heart but I'd be unhappy if I screwed up my brand new toy.

Jay

I agree, but I'm an idiot and I can never leave well enough alone :)

But I'm hoping to add a larger hard drive for more music and hoping someone here figures out how to load MP3's right to the drive. If that works, all that time will not be in vain.

And most of that time was backing up the stock drive 3 different ways and reformatting one of my extra 250 gig drives to store the data and then reformatting the 40 gig test drive I was putting the files on to.

If you were just going to unlock the stock drive, that will cost $50. Then copy one new backup files on there, and stick it back into your z1. That's the minimum you will need. And it wouldn't have taken that long.

But yes you are right. It's a lot of work and effort and money just to change the boot image. It has a lot of risk as well.

ducatiboy said:

It has a lot of risk as well.

That's the part that bothers me the most.

But if you unlock the drive and take an image of it very first thing, aren't you pretty safe? You can always reimage the factory drive back to the original state can't you? You may have a few dollars in unlocking the thing a time or two though....

03Aviator said:

ducatiboy said:

It has a lot of risk as well.

That's the part that bothers me the most.

But if you unlock the drive and take an image of it very first thing, aren't you pretty safe? You can always reimage the factory drive back to the original state can't you? You may have a few dollars in unlocking the thing a time or two though....

Yah, and now I did one, and it was ok, I feel more confident that I would do it again, but the first time letting some "unknown" program mess with my $2K nav system drive was very unsetteling.

I did make a back up of the stock drive and I didn't mess with it. I tried restoring the back up on to another drive. And messed with that. It should be pretty safe. But I just wanted to warn people that doing something like this will have some risk in it, and you could end up with a door stop. I will be pulling my drive out again and messing with it some more. Cause I'm more confident now, but just to warn people....

ducatiboy said:

03Aviator said:

ducatiboy said:

It has a lot of risk as well.

That's the part that bothers me the most.

But if you unlock the drive and take an image of it very first thing, aren't you pretty safe? You can always reimage the factory drive back to the original state can't you? You may have a few dollars in unlocking the thing a time or two though....

Yah, and now I did one, and it was ok, I feel more confident that I would do it again, but the first time letting some "unknown" program mess with my $2K nav system drive was very unsetteling.

I did make a back up of the stock drive and I didn't mess with it. I tried restoring the back up on to another drive. And messed with that. It should be pretty safe. But I just wanted to warn people that doing something like this will have some risk in it, and you could end up with a door stop. I will be pulling my drive out again and messing with it some more. Cause I'm more confident now, but just to warn people....

Very close to what I originally did.

Let me give out some general confidence with a disclaimer.

The laptop HDD in the Z1 is a Windows formatted drive. Nothing more. It is not even a "system" drive with boot files, it is only data. Think D: drive in your PC if you have one. You just store stuff there. It has 4 partitions. It is locked using a widely used ATA locking system that has been around for years. Once defeated this drive can be mounted in a PC with no problems. After you create an image of this drive and apply it to another, larger, drive you can put your original on the shelf and don't touch it again. You will be just using the "backup"

Here is my disclaimer. Not my fault if you break something. Pioneer is free to change this units design at any time and make all the stuff done up to this point nearly worthless.

I doubt they will change it quickly as it wouldn't be a good business decision money wise. They would need to send us all an update and get us to apply it to change the existing units and begin to change the production on the ones they are building now.

Ducati,

Have you been successful with mounting the system on the replacement drive? Another member has been having a lot of strange problems and a little voice in the back of my head said maybe I just got lucky. Just looking for confirmation that this stuff I've been doing can be replicated.

Thx.

Pulp_Fiction said:

Ducati,

Have you been successful with mounting the system on the replacement drive? Another member has been having a lot of strange problems and a little voice in the back of my head said maybe I just got lucky. Just looking for confirmation that this stuff I've been doing can be replicated.

Thx.

It was late last night after 4 hours of backups and re-images and nothing ever worked. It never booted up ever with the replacement drive.

So just to see it work so I could go to bed and not hate myself all night, I changed the boot bmp image on the stock drive (saving the orignal file of course). And put the stock drive back in. And since I was done, I installed the cover and noticed that it has a little arm which pushes a button, so it is important to have the cover on when you turn on the unit. I never tried the new drive with the cover, I always had the cover off.

I will try tonight when I get some time, swaping out the drives again and seeing if it re-locked my stock drive (it probably did since I didn't do anything to it) and if I can run off the other drive. If putting the cover on over top of the replacement drive allows it to boot, I'll run it like that from now on. I disabled security on the replacement drive. Hopefully my only problem was the cover.

I'll let you all know how the replacement drive runs.

ducatiboy said:

Pulp_Fiction said:

Ducati,

Have you been successful with mounting the system on the replacement drive? Another member has been having a lot of strange problems and a little voice in the back of my head said maybe I just got lucky. Just looking for confirmation that this stuff I've been doing can be replicated.

Thx.

It was late last night after 4 hours of backups and re-images and nothing ever worked. It never booted up ever with the replacement drive.

So just to see it work so I could go to bed and not hate myself all night, I changed the boot bmp image on the stock drive (saving the orignal file of course). And put the stock drive back in. And since I was done, I installed the cover and noticed that it has a little arm which pushes a button, so it is important to have the cover on when you turn on the unit. I never tried the new drive with the cover, I always had the cover off.

I will try tonight when I get some time, swaping out the drives again and seeing if it re-locked my stock drive (it probably did since I didn't do anything to it) and if I can run off the other drive. If putting the cover on over top of the replacement drive allows it to boot, I'll run it like that from now on. I disabled security on the replacement drive. Hopefully my only problem was the cover.

I'll let you all know how the replacement drive runs.

The simple things. This is why I wouldn't make a good teacher. I knew about the arm on the HDD cover that pushes the lever that clicks the switch that turns on the unit but I never told anybody because I didn't think too.

So, yes, you need the plastic cover with the 2 T8 torx screws on or the unit will not boot. I think the fan will turn on though to fool you.

Pulp_Fiction said:

Ducati,

Have you been successful with mounting the system on the replacement drive? Another member has been having a lot of strange problems and a little voice in the back of my head said maybe I just got lucky. Just looking for confirmation that this stuff I've been doing can be replicated.

Thx.

If you saw the other post, I think you might have gotten lucky. My replacement drive is real flakey. No reboots, but lots of locking up.

ducatiboy said:

Pulp_Fiction said:

Ducati,

Have you been successful with mounting the system on the replacement drive? Another member has been having a lot of strange problems and a little voice in the back of my head said maybe I just got lucky. Just looking for confirmation that this stuff I've been doing can be replicated.

Thx.

If you saw the other post, I think you might have gotten lucky. My replacement drive is real flakey. No reboots, but lots of locking up.

So you went out and tried your replacement drive with the cover in place this time and it locked up on you?

That's not good....

Any ideas why Pulp is having success and no one else is? I wonder if there is a difference in units? Any production dates? How about replacement hard drives? Are you both using the same brand? My son and I were about to start digging into this ourselves, but there is no way I'll play with the factory drive. I plan on imaging it and setting it aside and working with the replacement drive only. This news kinda sucks...

I also remember something Pulp said about setting up the partitions on the larger drive. Pulp...didn't you have to tweak those in order to make it work?

EDIT: Scratch that. I see where Pulp answered this question in another thread. Damn.

This is sucking.

I've been running the replacement drive for almost a month with no problems at all. It's an 80 gig OEM laptop drive from Dell.

Ducati, PM or post the info on the drive (s) you have tried. Perhaps I have one of the same lying around and can try.

Ducati, One more thing since you're at work with the problem drive. Please mount it in your PC (either usb or ide adapter) and run the full surface scan. Maybe it has a defective sector? <---Wild guess.

And... Did you do a verify when you imaged the drive? Which version of Ghost did you use?


Oh and, I finally put my unit back in the car last night with your flasher. Works great as expected. I did however manage to do something with my parking lights, ACC mode and starting the car where I caused confusion and it failed. When starting the car like a normal person should it worked great. :lol:

I used Ghost 8 (corporate?) and ghost 2003 from the "super boot cd" or something.

The hard drive I used was a stock Hitachi OEM for IBM 40 gig drive. I have acess to a 30 gig one as well, same brand and model just different size. When I get home, I'm going to pull that drive (and put my stock one back) and run the surface test and I'll post the exact make and model of that drive I used.

ducatiboy said:

I used Ghost 8 (corporate?) and ghost 2003 from the "super boot cd" or something.

The hard drive I used was a stock Hitachi OEM for IBM 40 gig drive. I have acess to a 30 gig one as well, same brand and model just different size. When I get home, I'm going to pull that drive (and put my stock one back) and run the surface test and I'll post the exact make and model of that drive I used.

Ghost 2003 used here.

Super boot CD. Ooooo, sounds cool! :lol:

I guess it was the ultimate boot cd :)

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

when you guys talk about it 'costing $50' to unlock the HDD, what does that mean exactly? the cost of the software required to unlock it? thanks!

seattleh2 said:

when you guys talk about it 'costing $50' to unlock the HDD, what does that mean exactly? the cost of the software required to unlock it? thanks!

The software is free, but the license to unlock 1 drive 1 time was $50. They have multiple unlock licenses for cheaper prices though.