I just bought an escient H40 on ebay. This is an older model (with a 40 gig hard drive of course) and I want to store a fairly large music collection on it. I intend to replace the hard drive with a larger one. It has been said that this is difficult to accomplish on accounta the factory has made it so.

Has anyone out there successfully replaced their hard drive?

I'm thinking the place to start is to partition the new drive and mirror the OS to the new drive, my thinking being that the escient processor won't know the difference. Of course, I could be full of &h!t.

Any thoughts?

Any luck?

Still no luck. Would love to know myself.

Good luck as Escient keys the software to the MAC address.

I will tell that I have sent several "older" fireballs (E40) back to Escient which have had a bad hard disk. They replaced the drive with an 80 gig drive ( they do not have anymore 40 gigs in stock ) for free.

You might call Escient and see if they will send you a restore cd (golden image). You should them be able to replace the hard drive and reinstall the software. Without the golden image cd, I do not think it is possible to do what you want.

I agree with Sailn, I sent my E80 back and it a few days had an upgraded 160gb drive and no cost to me sitting on my front door. Can't get any better than that.

I can help out if Escient won't, though I am really curious if they will! Just ping me. I am working on a blog to outline the upgrades that can be done for the Escients ( Search google for escientblog ). I haven't gotten the Fireball documented yet, but check it out over the next few weeks.

The Escient Fireball H40 can only be upgraded to a 120GB or 160GB drive. Due to the limitations of either the IDE chipset or IDE device drivers... I havent figured out which yet... the maximum space that the OS will recognize is about 130GB. I recommend the older Maxtor 4R120L0 or 4R160L0 media Quickview drives which work much quieter in the Fireball that the Western Digital drives that they use.

The easiest path is to do a full install with the golden CD modified to support the drive selected.

FYI, due to the networking options of the H40... you can combine multiple Escients on a network to support a larger virtual music collection.

Hope this helps and let me know if Escient was helpful. If you need install help or access to the CD, let me know. I thought Escient dropped all support for the H40 and E40 units. Thanks!

brunob00,

I could use some help with the H40. I'd like to upgrade the drive. Would you be willing to
send a copy of the install disc?

Thanks-

You might also look at selling the H40 and getting a E40 or better. The E can be updated to the E2 software. This will let you use fireballPC which allows you to store files on a PC. It will not work with a NAS unless ( the NAS runs windows or you are still using a PC to access the NAS )

Does anyone have a copy of the 'golden image cd' for the H-40?:confused:

Emailed and PM'd brunob00 a few times, but hes MIA. Anyone heard from him, or even still messing around with their older Escient music managers?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks-

I had no luck finding the CD your asking for. If your having problems give Escient a call or doing a search like brunob00 says will bring up his web page.

Thanks lovebohn. brunob00's page hasn't been updated to include info regarding the H-40, and searches for the elusive 'Golden disc' have yielded me squat as well. So I think I'll take your advice, and ask Escient for help.

Thanks-

I'm not sure Escient will help you just to upgrade the drive size for free, but if your having problems it might be a different story.

Sorry for being MIA... for some reason I did not get notified of the posts. I can help with an upgrade for the Escient H-40 series. You can upgrade from the standard 40GB upto 120GB!

Thanks,
Brunob00