Anyone ever switch out the hard drive?
 

I just bought a 2010 with NAV. it only has a 9GB hard drive. I was wondering if any one has tried to upgrade to a bigger drive. If so what OS was it formatted with?

I am wondering the same thing?!

Pull it out and plug it into a computer to see. If it's in a format your computer can read then you can probably image the contents to a larger drive. Do not modify a single file on the drive until you have a backup.

First I would suggest imaging the drive to a larger drive without resizing the partition. Test it and see if it works. Image the partition(s), don't copy files. Copying changes attributes like time/date/modification stamps.
If it works then resize the partition and test it and see if it works again.

My reasoning for the steps I suggest is that I imagine there are more than just maps on that hard drive. Probably the nav software or the entire nav system OS. I don't know how it will react to seeing a different hard drive brand/model/size (hopefully the systems isn't locked to a specific range of Nissan approved serial numbers for the hard drive). Secondly, the software may be written to have X amount of total/free space and may not use the additional space even if it's available.

Disclaimer: I am not a Nissan software engineer. I did not design the system and have no specific knowledge of how it will react to all of this. You do this at your own risk.

Good luck.

Agree, no telling how it's partitioned etc. Be a million to one chance it's not some funky file system proprietary to Nissan.
I don't think the OS will be able to write more than originally designed for, not like you're getting more space, be nice to have a back up though. HDD aren't the most reliable things. I would love an SSD in there. Fast as hell.
Keep us posted though.

Subd for results.

My guess is the OS is proprietary, but I wouldn't be surprised if it uses one of the standard file systems. If that's the case and you can access it in a computer, I recommend Acronis True Image and their Clone Disk Tool. I literally did this an hour ago on a work computer to upgrade an 80GB SSD boot partition to a 250GB SSD. It took longer to physically swap out the drives than it did for the clone process including a couple of restarts.

^^ I agree Acronis is some good stuff! Just make sure you do a backup image of the entire drive before doing any monkeying around with it.

Hopefully it wont be like what Microsoft did with their xbox 360 drives. That thing is a bitch to change out drives unless you wanna pay x4 as much for one of their stupid drives. Had to flash the firmware find the perfect match drive gah pain in the ***.

Has anyone ever seen a photo of the inside of the Navi Dash Box?
Now I'm obsessed with seeing the interface of the HDD connector, whether or not it's IDE with the pins or IDE with the Ribbon connector. I sure would love to put an IDE to SATA connector on there with an SATA SSD....

I know, I'm dreaming but it does sound sweet.

It's IDE pins. I dont see any advantage to using a solid state hard drive in this situation. I dont believe the hard drive is the slowest component in the A/V system. In any case, it's a proprietary file system that is locked. There was some exploration in this matter a long time ago on the G37 forums but it eventually died.

Hey! Thanks for all the info.

Reviving this thread to post a link. I'm going to work on a hard drive backup procedure in a while, inspired by the work Elco did with his G37 in Romania. I'm not spending $4,892 to replace the whole nav computer when the hard drive eventually dies in a few years.

is it really a hard disk drive? It might be flash as it is so cheap.