Ipod Hard Drive adventure

[Guest]

[Pia Pium]

Well my hard drive failed and I planned (still plan to eventually) to put a solid state in; but life happens and I don't have the money for it right now. So I was looking around my house trying to see what I could make a project out of the other day and I noticed my Ipod Classic lying where it has been for the last few months, unused, and an idea came to me. So after some minor case popping, pin counting (as well as some sweat and tears trying to get it all to fit back in), I have my 120 GB Ipod Classic hard drive installed in my OQO 02.

I tried to use my recovery disk but I get an error message saying that the disk is meant for 60 GB drives only. So then I tried installing Windows 7, it sees the drive but when I select it the wizard says it is not a bootable media. I tried reformatting it there in the 7 install wizard but it failed. So I booted up Puppy Linux and tried using GParted to reformat the drive and make it bootable, but for some reason GParted kept freezing in the first step. So I've passed my Frankenstein over to a techie friend who has more knowledge and tools than I do to see if he can get it to work.

While I waited for his diagnoses I thought I'd ask you guys about your thoughts.

[adrienspawn]

I'd imagine it has something to do with how it's formatted. I would try connecting it to a full-fledged PC that has it's own HDD to work from, and format it correctly from there. I'm bad with this kind of stuff though.

As a last resort, for 25$ you can get an 8GB CF card and 1.8" converter.

[Ronc]

I bought a couple of solid state drives at different times from eBay. I started by plugging each one into an adapter arrangement that converted PATA-ZIF of the drives to USB so it can be plugged into any USB port on a Windows computer. One drive was recognized right away since it came formatted in NTFS. The other was not. I fixed it by using Vista's Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Storage/Disk Management feature. After that it was recognized in Windows Explorer as an NTFS drive and I was able to read and write to it over USB. So far I installed a 90-Day trial version of Windows 7 Ultimate on one of the drives after putting it into my new 2+ OQO. The trial version should last me up to 600 days:
http://www.oqotalk.com/index.php/topic,4767.0.html

As far as the Model 02 with Vista is concerned, I haven't tried that. However, there is a service available which will offer an ssd upgrade keeping the same OS:
http://www.shop.sysmgt.com/product.sc?productId=6&categoryId=4
"Upgrade your OQO to 128GB SSD. This service includes the drive, labor and transfer of existing data from your old drive..." He also mentions the option of putting the new drive in the original OQO-OEM state so it must be possible; however he may be doing something other that using the 60 GB Vista Image Disk that came with some of our Model 02 OQOs.