I am taking possession of a BV9 with inbuilt Beomedia. The HD capacity is 250Gb. 

Can this be upgraded to a larger capacity disc as it becomes full ( inevitable with time)

Does any one know if the disc in the Beomedia is simply a 3.5 inch standard drive?

Lastly...is there any way of attaching an external drive directly to facilitate a backup process ?

Hello.

I can't say directly, as I don't have a Beomedia.

I would however say it is probably possible, and I will be amazed if the HDD is not a 3.5 "standard" drive.

My advice would be to clone the existing drive to a larger HDD and try it. This is assuming  the Beomedia is happy using a "different" HDD - some Apple stuff looks for particular HDD's, and if yours isn't in the list... maybe a Beomedia will do similar, maybe not.

As long as your original HDD is put safely out of harms reach, all should be fine, as you can always go back to it.  Just don't accidentally format it by mistake when connecting it to your computer!

Please let us know the results of your experiment - good luck!

Thanks Ray

It really should be possible as it is nothing special to upgrade hard drives in most ocmputers these days and the beomedia is really no more than that.

I will let you know......

Please do - I'm sure quite a few Beomedia owners will be very interested in your results.

Hi

As you can see in this photo, the hard drive is a standard 3,5" HDD.

Thanks for the photo Quim - That looks standard enough for me. 

So unless it does the Apple trick of looking for a particular drive firmware ID, (which I doubt) then it should be plain sailing to increase the size of the HDD.

Is it worth upgrading the RAM as well?????

I'm interested in knowing if trying to bring up to date (Windows XP SP3, for instance) through Microsoft Update can harm/handicap my Beomedia's performance.  It certainly would let more websites be visible.

Barry

Large48:

Is it worth upgrading the RAM as well?????

I upgraded mine from 256 Kb to 512 Kb, but didn't see any improvement.

I would have thought a small RAM upgrade like that wouldn't offer any improvements. I was thinking of more going to 1GB or above as memory is so cheap these days.

I'm not familiar with the BeoMedia's architecture, but if you can install enough RAM to turn off paging, then that should see pretty big increases in performance.  If not, if it would be possible to put the page file on a separate HDD (again I don't know the architecture) then that should also see some performance gains.

Just a couple of ideas .

Large48:

I would have thought a small RAM upgrade like that wouldn't offer any improvements. I was thinking of more going to 1GB or above as memory is so cheap these days.

Remember that a machine like that usually will not eat the latest big DDR2 memories. The older types can be much more expensive if you have to buy them new now.

Also, if 256M or 512M already is quite enough for what the machine is doing, adding more simply will not bring any benefits. Windows will use the extra for disk cacheing, but in a sequential use like music & video playback, it will not do much good.

As it runs Windows XP, I'd expect 512M to be plenty good, unless you have found new memory consuming tasks for the Beomedia.

It's a quite easy technical upgrade. A couple of years ago, I did the upgrade from a 80GB hard drive to a 250GB. Please note that the Beomedia software is installed on one of the partitions of the hard drive, so you need to 'clone' the old hard drive to the new one. If necessary, you can enlarge the partitions afterwards (with hard drive partition tools). If I remember well, there were three partitions on the drive (software - data – backup/restore). The data partition is the biggest one. This is the partition where you store all your audio, photo and video files.

I changed my 160GB hard drive to a 320 GB five months ago, everything still working perfectly.

Approach:

1) Demounting 160 GB hard drive (3,5 ’’) from Beomedia1

2) Fitting the 160 GB hard drive into an external USB hard drive storage

3) Using the software “Acronis True Image Home 2009” to get an image of the 160 GB hard drive on my computer

5) Copying the image on a 320 GB hard drive. The additional capacity I allocated to partition I:\Data

6) Mounting the 320 GB hard drive into the Beomedia1

Alsfeld:

I changed my 160GB hard drive to a 320 GB five months ago, everything still working perfectly.

 

Approach:

1) Demounting 160 GB hard drive (3,5 ’’) from Beomedia1

2) Fitting the 160 GB hard drive into an external USB hard drive storage

3) Using the software “Acronis True Image Home 2009” to get an image of the 160 GB hard drive on my computer

5) Copying the image on a 320 GB hard drive. The additional capacity I allocated to partition I:\Data

6) Mounting the 320 GB hard drive into the Beomedia1

I just upgraded my Bomedia Hard Disk to a 500 Gb HDD following your instructions. Thanks

But I used Norton Magic Partition to make the E partition (Data) bigger. First I got an error, but I did a Recovery System from Beomedia and now everything is working fine, so I have now almost 450 Gb for music

Cheers!

Just trying to get some extra info on this.

So, if anyone can help, I would be gratefull!

I've tried several cloning programs, but I keep getting errors when I want to start the machine.

I've bought a 1TB SATA drive with a SATA - IDE converter.

The drive has been recognized as a standard 1TB drive in the BIOS, so that's not the problem.

The only thing I can do is cloning the drive with the exact same 4 partition sizes as the original 160GB.

So, the orignal disk has 4 partitions, named "Recovery", "System", "Data" and a hidden "BM System".

If I want to enlarge the Data partition, I have to move the hidden "BM System" partition to the end of the drive.

And this is something I can do with Paragon Partition Manager. But as soon as I restart the machine, I get errors.

Any ideas about what I'm doing wrong? Do I have to install a partition manager under the Beomedia XP to enlarge the data partition?

I've found a hidden folder "System" on the data partition which is mouned to the BM System partition.

If also tried several beomedia recovery options, but without any luck.

Ok, I solved the problem myself.

You have to copy the disk sector by sector. Then all the hidden files are copied too.

After that you have to install a partionmanager to move the hidden "BM-System"partition to the end of the disk.

So you end up with a unallocated partion next to the data partition which you add to it.

After that you have to delete the hidden "System" folder inside the BM-Share folder, which seems to be only a mounted volume linked to the "BM-System" partition.

You have to make a new empty folder (mounted volume) "Sytem" which is mounted to the new moved partition "BM-System".

You have to check whether there are hidden files in "BM-System". If not, you'll have to start again...