"Boyd Stephen Smith Jr." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> posted [EMAIL PROTECTED], excerpted below, on Sun, 01 Oct 2006 19:58:21 -0500:
> I was at the iriveramerica site earlier this week and remember it saying > neither the HD nor the battery was replaceable. That said, sometimes > official websites give out information the manufacturer *wants* to be > true, so rockbox or other project sites might be better information -- in > any case, the iriveramerica site, after a little bit of fighting, can do > interactively queried about the devices. I've a very strong suspicion that's simply the standard "No user serviceable parts inside" thing that most of us geeks have been ignoring since before we could even read it! =8^) I'd particularly say that's the case with the battery, as it's virtually a given that /those/ are replaceable, even if they are custom lithium-ion shaped batteries and finding one that'd actually fit the case would be difficult. Match up the voltage and get in roughly the same or higher amp-hour range, and it should work, even if it's simply pulling the dead one and replacing it with a plug for an external battery to plugin, since it won't fit the custom shaped slot. Again, that's /exactly/ the sort of thing I've been replacing since not long after I could read. While the newer li-ion custom shaped gelpacks are changing things a bit, you'd be surprised at how many battery packs are simply prewired triple-pack AA rechargeables with a plug wired onto them, or the like. If that's the case with the battery, and they make the same non-user-replaceable claim for both the battery and the hard drive, I'm extremely skeptical about their claim on the hard drive as well. Of course, one has to be careful to get the right interface -- buying a new 120 gig 1.8" SATA won't do any good if the drive being replaced is a 20 gig 1.8" IDE, and then there's the question of whether they use one of the industry standard interface pinouts or went with something proprietary, but that info is often available well before the community firmware support is ready. Remember, the iPod batteries weren't officially user replaceable either, and may still not be. Same with their hard drives. However, determined users have been replacing those for years. There's even sites documenting how to replace an iPod's 1.8" drive (say it died) with a full desktop sized 3.5" drive of several hundred gigs, altho of course in that case the iPod is strapped to the drive and the drive requires an external power supply. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman -- gentoo-amd64@gentoo.org mailing list
