General Forum

Re: Hard Drive capacity for Beomedia.....can it be upgraded?

Beobuddy — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 14:43:37 GMT

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...

Re: Hard Drive capacity for Beomedia.....can it be upgraded?

Beobuddy — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 17:15:41 GMT

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.

Re: Hard Drive capacity for Beomedia.....can it be upgraded?

Quim43 — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 12:40:44 GMT

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!

Re: Hard Drive capacity for Beomedia.....can it be upgraded?

Alsfeld — Fri, 01 May 2009 14:49:12 GMT

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

Re: Hard Drive capacity for Beomedia.....can it be upgraded?

Kiwi — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 13:51:12 GMT

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.

Re: Hard Drive capacity for Beomedia.....can it be upgraded?

tournedos — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 08:46:13 GMT

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.

Re: Hard Drive capacity for Beomedia.....can it be upgraded?

rayfenwick — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 08:38:33 GMT

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 .

Re: Hard Drive capacity for Beomedia.....can it be upgraded?

Large48 — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 08:29:16 GMT

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.

Re: Hard Drive capacity for Beomedia.....can it be upgraded?

Quim43 — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 12:55:54 GMT

Large48:

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

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

Re: Hard Drive capacity for Beomedia.....can it be upgraded?

bsantini — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 08:36:04 GMT

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

Re: Hard Drive capacity for Beomedia.....can it be upgraded?

Large48 — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 08:16:01 GMT

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

Re: Hard Drive capacity for Beomedia.....can it be upgraded?

rayfenwick — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 05:55:36 GMT

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.

Re: Hard Drive capacity for Beomedia.....can it be upgraded?

Quim43 — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 05:22:36 GMT

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

Re: Hard Drive capacity for Beomedia.....can it be upgraded?

rayfenwick — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 17:39:45 GMT

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

Re: Hard Drive capacity for Beomedia.....can it be upgraded?

miniter — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 14:56:06 GMT

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......