30GB is a lot of music my friends and I would love to fit as much music as possible on this bad boy, but a 2x rip speed is disgusting! I've been wondering if it was possible to actually pull the harddrive out of the MMCS, hook it up to a computer, and transfer all the songs I want manually?

Of course, this also opens the option of being able to replace the standard 30GB drive with something much larger, if need be.

Ideas? Suggestions? Is it even possible?

that would be cool. I have about 10 cd's that have no names or titles...def be alot eaier to pull it out and rename them on a laptop or something. If u search around here there is a mmCS wire diagram..maybe that would help... MITSU def has someting for this. if u flip open the screan, on the bottom theres a plug hole....possible and most likely for updates....def is possible....I hope it is cause its definitly more practical then they was it is now

I was following a forum on this question some time back. The short answer is: "no."

The long answer is: there are some people working on this, but it's a fairly complicated endeavor due to the encryption that the manufacturer places on the Hard Drive. In addition, the music that is stored on the HDD is not stored in MP3 format, but rather some proprietary format. Finally, the dive isn't just a standard laptop drive. It's a special drive that's made for automotive applications. It's a much tougher (Toshiba?) drive that is able to function at much lower and higher temperatures than your typical laptop drive.

I was just reading about a similar attempt to hack a Pioneer AVIC Z2 HDD based navigation unit and replace the (also 30gb) drive with a larger unit. These guys had managed as far as cracking the encryption and copying the system files to a larger laptop drive with similar operating parameters (not quite as good, especially the cold operating temps, but close). The problem they were having was that the system would reboot every 10 minutes with the new drive. Installed. So they don't have it figured out yet.

I know that I'd gladly shell out for a larger HD. Heck, even a 40gb drive would would more than double your music storage capacity. I've currently got 100 albums stored on my unit, and it's pretty sweet. But being able to store 200 albums would be awesome.

Try to search GOOGLE about "How to unlock MMCS outlander". I posted on another forum a small tutorial.
Basically you can change the disk with a larger one (from April will be available one with 80G from Toshiba), so you can use a larger partition for music, BUT take care that you have to use maybe a larger partition for CDDB, too. Also, you can not just copy the files on the music partition, you have to let MMCS rip them :crying:

Costin

The rip speed is 4x. And no, you can't acceess the HD directly. It's heavily encrypted, locked and the music isn't even stored as MP3s.

wouldnt you also need to find the software needed for the navi (compatible software) if u decide to replace the hd?

What you would do is ghost your old Hard Drive over to the new one, so that you wound up with an exact duplicate of your old Hard Drive, except with more free space. That's the general idea, anyway. You'd actually probably have to fiddle with the image to reapportion the free space appropriately.

At any rate, I'm hoping that eventually someone will figure it out and offer a service to upgrade your drive to a 40 gig model. Having an extra 10 gigs of music storage would pretty much satisfy my needs.