Sat Nav/Phone: Anyone clone the Hard drive in the MMM unit?

[silverball]

Hi Everyone, I have had a Hard drive go bad and replaced with a used unit from another MMM i purchased and it works great! I now would like to clone this Hard drive and put it my original unit and have a good working spare or resell. Has anyone cloned one of these I have tried using ImageBurn, and EaseUs disk copy but neither seem to recognize the hard drive. So I seem to be at an impasse.

[SwissXC90]

I saw some posts where people have tried. One guy succeeded. But cloning required special adaptors for the HDD and you have to do bitwise cloning

[silverball]

Thanks, it does seem to be a difficult nut to crack. i have the adapters problem is running windows doesn't recognize the hard drive because of its format. I am thinking of digging up an old computer with dos and trying to run it from that.

[Moose Test]

I can't vouch for it as being a tried and tested method, since I've fortunately never yet found myself in the situation of needing to to it. But you might try the popular open source tool "clonezilla". I'd suggest the "live" version, which effectively boots a small linux distro from USB or ISO and supports disk-to-disk cloning. I think you're more likely to have success with it than old DOS based utilities.

All that said, your original unit went bad for a reason. I wouldn't get my hopes up that it's still sufficiently functional to restore to a working state from the new image. Highly possible that it's suffered physical damage/failure.

[paddy74]

If you want to do such a thing, you _need_ a Linux based OS. You can try with a LiveCD/USB, I'd take Linux Mint. Use something to write the OS image that gives you the possibility to set a working (persistent) space on the USB drive. Afterwards Mint should have all you need on board.

But I have to be honest, if you don't understand or don't know what I'm talking about, maybe it would be better to leave that to some computer pro. Cloning a HDD isn't a big deal, but you need to know what you're doing.

[silverball]

Thanks to Moose Test and Paddy 74 for your insights, this is getting a bit out of my comfort zone but a buddy of mine is well versed so i guess i will hit him up to give it a try.

I have the Nav system now working with the donor unit i purchased from the united states, it just dropped in and no hassle with security codes so i would like to use its known good hard drive to copy and get my original unit working again, just to say it can be done.LOL.

[SwissXC90]

Are you located in the same region as the donor nav unit?

I have heard stories that a US region nav won’t work in Europe, and vice versa. But I do not know if that is true.

Did you exchange just the HDD, or did you fit the US Nav Computer (entire unit) to your car?

I have heard the VIN is stored in the nav, but I believe the VIN is stored in flash memory on the main board, and not in the HDD. Anzac with a wrong VIN is detected as a stolen /car wrong unit and the vehicle refuses to let it work.

It would be good to confirm the above,

[silverball]

My car is a US model from New York, I live in British Columbia Canada, The used complete unit came out of a car from California. I took the complete unit and dropped it in my car, I had read your posts from last year on this subject as well. Turned the key on and it booted straight up, no issues at all. It ran like it was the original unit right from the beginning. I checked the last 20 entries, that how i found out it came from california. So it seems that the units are not coded to the vehicle specific, but maybe rather by region.
Note that both units matched model and other numbers except for the last four or five digits of the serial number.
So it took a matter of maybe 10 minutes to take a non working nav system and restore it to a working system by just dropping in another unit.
I did however install an update Hardware, Software discs that i purchased from volvo for 40 canadian I will post the part numbers for reference, I just have to go back to my shop and grab them. These discs are not map updates and can be used multiple times according to volvo service bulletins.

[ilmiont]

I don't have any experience with newer Volvos (P2 owner here) or the navigation systems, but I believe these drives are protected by ATA-level security which may complicate the cloning procedure.


As indicated by others, with access to a Linux system, if it were an unprotected hard drive, this would be a really straightforward procedure - e.g. use "dd" to clone on a byte level:


dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=32M


If it is ATA-protected (e.g. as described here) that may explain why it's not showing up in the partitioning tools you've used, and also complicates the clone procedure as it'll need to be unlocked first. Looks like the poster in that thread has obtained the unlock password though, so it might be best you give that a read.


On an entirely different note, it really is time Volvo and other car brands switched to using SSDs! A mechanical hard drive in a constantly moving vehicle is always going to be high-risk and prone to failure. SSDs cost almost nothing these days, are much faster and have no moving parts... time car manufacturers caught up.


And to carry on from that... there's no reason why you couldn't clone onto an SSD if you wanted to! Get an SSD from Amazon, clone onto that, enjoy greater performance and a much lower risk of drive failure due to vibration/bumps.

[silverball]

Thanks a bunch for all the useful info, as you say this is getting rather complicated. Will see if my buddy is up to the challenge or if we should just pass on any further ventures as I do have a working unit now and really don't want to screw up the hdd in it.