bo_jangles

Anyone ever replace the Command/Nav hard drive on a W221?

Was is easy?

Is it PATA or SATA? I'm guessing PATA for a car designed in the early-to-mid 2000's.

I can hear mine spinning and I don't know if it's going to die soon or if that's normal.

Also, anyone tried to replace it with an SSD? I think it's only 20-40GB, and those are pretty cheap (although PATA ones might be harder to find).

Can you take out the car's hard drive, hook it to a PC, clone the image to a different drive, and use the new one?

I suppose none of this is possible without a dealer.

Any thoughts/experience?

Thanks!

lboudreau

I have not personally done this, however, having a background in IT I can tell you that if you replaced the drive inside with a SSD it would be possible to clone the original drive using Norton Ghost or any other cloning software. As long as the partition is identical in the new drive then it should theoretically work. The only catch is if the interface chipset on command verifies things like drive type/size, then it would essentially reject the new drive.

bo_jangles

Yeah, some DVRs have internal drives that don't work on a normal PC, so I was curious if the MB HDDs were like that. I suppose this question isn't S-class specific.

EvilTwin

Harddrive replacement is completely doable:
1. Pull out the unit (I think I have instructions for that somewhere)
2. Take out the harddrive (6 or 8 torx screws and some strange spring mechanism, that is rather non-protective against vibration)
3. Connect your harddrive with 2.5" to 3.5" adaptor to a pc and also connect a 2.5" ide to CF adaptor with a good 32Gb 300x CF card.
4. Launch some small linux distribution from usb flash drive.
5. Execute command: dmesg |grep /dev/sd
6. see both the harddrive and the cf card recognised (one is 20 gig hdd and second should be 32 gig cf - linux will name them approprietly - /dev/sda and /dev/sdb - remember, which is which)
7. Execute command: dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb (IF YOUR ORIGINAL DRIVE IS /dev/sda and target CF IS /dev/sdb - get this wrong and you have no navigation and air-con controls!!!)
8 After some 20 - 30 minutes you have a good SSD to put in your navigation.
9. It is much easier if you do that before your navigation is toast, because of broken HDD - I know, because right now I am searching for a HDD image to write to a blank hdd to revive this darn thing.
As usual, I bare no responsibility for a toast system, but I know linux well, to know, how this navigation works. It uses QNX4 operating system with most bits programmed in Ukraine... Filesystem is qnx4-fs aswell, so Acronis, Ghost or any other software will not get the hang of it. DD, on the other hand is brilliant, because it makes a 1:1 copy of every bit. Need any help on that - drop me a pm.

listerone

Interesting stuff.Do ya think that it possible to replace the factory HD on a 2011 (which,I assume,is an SSD...but am uncertain) with a larger drive,having cloned the contents of the factory drive onto the replacement? Perhaps a 64GB,or even 128GB,SSD? I suspect,as already mentioned,that it could be difficuly because of some speacial code that MB places on the factory drive.

EvilTwin

Can't tell you without more info about this drive and file systems.
If you can hook it up to a pc running linux, I can tell you commands to execute and get full info about partitins, filesystems etc.
If it is a new generation of the same qnx4 based system, it could still be done...

Diesel Benz

Are you assuming the extra HDD space would automatically become available for something useful like music register?

EvilTwin

Well, as I said before, it might be that way.
There are numerous upgrades like that for dodge and bmw systems and if you connect this harddrive to a working qnx6.5 system, you could backup your existing music collection, recreate this partition up to the end of harddisk and copy back the contents and see what happens then.

nishboo

I think my hard drive is done. It finally died, however I am not too sure.

Either way, I wouldnt mind trying to change the HD to a new one. Any help from you EvilTwin will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Digitalsleep

Hello,

I am being told by the dealer that the hard drive in my command unit is bad and it's causing my command unit to not work.

1 does anyone have the instructions on how to remove my command unit form the dash.
2 does anyone have any opinion on will replacing the hard dive in my command unit will fix my issues


thanks for any help

-Digitalsleep