what is on this hard drive?

[Chili]

having issues with my satnav at the moment, its almost like it has gone into a coma, mercedes dealer had the car on a diagnostic and they said they could not communicate with the satnav side of things and it was dead, however every once in a while i get little signs that it is alive, so i took the unit out and looked a little deeper, for now i have all the info i need but i would like to know what is stored on this hard drive....is it the actual navigation software or something else??
have attached 3 pictures of the unit, the drive and the screen it is stuck on

thanks for looking

 

[Chrishazle]

Take a trip to comand.co.uk, AKA Unique Car Sounds, at Lightwater - just a couple of miles off J3 M3. They will sort it out!!

 

[Chili]

Take a trip to comand.co.uk, AKA Unique Car Sounds, at Lightwater - just a couple of miles off J3 M3. They will sort it out!!

cheers

 

[Chili]

so i called them today and they tried to tell me the hard drive was special and costs £800, its a 100gb laptop hard drive £50 at most nothing special at all about the drive except whats on it

 

[Chrishazle]

Unfortunately it's not a normal HDD as we know it - as I found after they'd changed the HDD on my S204 and I tried to read the old one using Win10 and a proper HDD USB dock! For a start, the HDD in my Comand NTG4 is a special Toshiba specifically designed for mobile/vehicle use (research on this is documented on this forum, look for my posts on the subject) rather than in a laptop or PC. For seconds the OS installed is nothing normal folk can handle - I tried a number of ways to get into the old one without success. So - you need specialist knowledge to get into the damned thing - simply replacing the HDD in my NTG4 so I could install map updates later than 2014-15 was £400, but came with the 2018-19 update - although there does not appear to have been an update since!

If you want to remain with MB Comand, try asking MB Canterbury. Your other option - which probably upgrades the system - is to ask comand.co.uk about replacing the unit with a Pioneer or similar, or taking a chance with an aftermarket Chinese unit as some on here have been lucky to succeed with, but others have not.

 

[Chili]

Unfortunately it's not a normal HDD as we know it - as I found after they'd changed the HDD on my S204 and I tried to read the old one using Win10 and a proper HDD USB dock! For a start, the HDD in my Comand NTG4 is a special Toshiba specifically designed for mobile/vehicle use (research on this is documented on this forum, look for my posts on the subject) rather than in a laptop or PC. For seconds the OS installed is nothing normal folk can handle - I tried a number of ways to get into the old one without success. So - you need specialist knowledge to get into the damned thing - simply replacing the HDD in my NTG4 so I could install map updates later than 2014-15 was £400, but came with the 2018-19 update - although there does not appear to have been an update since!

If you want to remain with MB Comand, try asking MB Canterbury. Your other option - which probably upgrades the system - is to ask comand.co.uk about replacing the unit with a Pioneer or similar, or taking a chance with an aftermarket Chinese unit as some on here have been lucky to succeed with, but others have not.

i would beg to differ about the drive been special, and a usb dock would not work, sata to serial is the way to go to unlock them you need an old pc pref win7, some have been unlocked using linux and xboxhdm, you then need to get the unique password which will be something like this "B2BAB3BCB0DFACBEB1BBBEDFB1ADD2CDCFC8DFB19E8996DFAA8C9A8DDFDFDFDF" once you have obtained this and unlocked the drive then it can be read in a windows pc easily
As for mb canterbury, they have had the car on diagnostic and were unable to communicate with the nav and told me the units are no longer made and used to cost £2006.00 however i think my hard drive is in a coma and trying to wake up as every now and again i will see bits of navi appear on the screen, personally i think it needs flashing/installing again.
the 3 pictures below the 2 with the green connector showing is the drive out the car the 3rd with the felt tip number on it is my spare scratch drive, now try telling me the car 1 is special, what is special is the poxy software on it and its a bloody mechanical drive thats held in place in a tiny caddy by 3 small screws, would of been best to just stick with becker units, no moving parts.
if push comes to shove i would put something in there that allows me to keep the original unit and functions. i have a guy in somerset looking into this now for me

 

[Chili]

where did you get your's fixed?

 

[Chrishazle]

comand.co.uk in Lightwater.

 

[richard]

We get very frustrated by people saying that "its just a cheap PC drive" - it is not. So feel free to beg to differ, but you are incorrect.

Its a bios locked Automotive specification drive. Automotive spec drives (a) run slower RPM and (b) have better damping then a PC drive (c) have a wider temperature range than PC drives (Standard automotive electronics range is -40C to +105C I recall, so somewhere near that on the drive). The car is a *horrible* environment, theres not a lot of cooling around the COMAND (unlike a PC) and they have to cope with very big bumps etc - try dropping a PC from 10" a few times and the HDD will be no longer. And left in the sun the temperatures under the black dashboard can get very very high. I actually found out this in September 1998 on a flight from Manchester to London as I was sat next to the Automotive Hard Disk specialist from Seagate. I remember the date because my daughter was born a few hours after my arrival back in London, and I'd had a G+T or two so my dear wife had to drive me back from the airport.

Looking at the drive in the picture, the left one is a slower (4260 RPM, instead of 5400 or 7200) WD Endurastar drive - clue is in the name.

When you change the drive to a new one, you may have to do a firmware update on the head-unit also, (using Online Xentry Diagnosis) because formats change between different software releases (partition sizes, and for some versions of COMAND there is the operating system on the drive too). Sometimes you need to do that without the hard disk in, sometimes with.
- For instance NTG2.5 systems need the latest firmware to understand the latest version of the map, and W204 NTG4 if you have new format HDD and old software the system keeps rebooting.
- We therefore always do a firmware update. On NTG4.5 you'll need to re-install the map too with the appropriate licence key.
Of course you may be lucky with a used drive.

My expectation from your description is that your hard disk is full of errors somewhere in the middle of the data it needs for what it's trying to display (or for the music database entries that match what you are playing (CDDB) - and you are waiting for retries and sector remaps.

Hope that helps

Richard

 

[Chrishazle]

Thanks Richard, I hoped either you or Mark would see this thread. OP, if you do a little research on here you'll find comments like "Comand.co.uk have forgotten more about MB ICE than any main dealer knows" Lightwater is quite easy from Canterbury - it's a couple of miles from M3 J3, there's a decent pub a couple of hundred yards back up the road for lunch while you wait, and (as is obvious from Richard's reply) they know their stuff. Their shop name is Unique Car Sounds, they also sell and fit aftermarket quality units like Pioneer (they won't touch cheapie Chinese units, even "customer supplied") if you decide it's not worth rescuing your Comand system.

 

[suty455]

is it not possible to change to an SSD drive?

 

[Chrishazle]

The only ones that can answer that are @richard and/or @Alfie at comand.co.uk. I had to have the HDD on my early NTG4 S204 changed by them so I could install maps later than 2014-15 - which they did, installing 2018-19 as part of the deal. I bought the old HDD home and tried to read it with my USB docking thing, not a cat in hell's chance!

 

[Chili]

you would of thought they would of used ssd'd in the 1st place

 

[suty455]

The only ones that can answer that are @richard and/or @Alfie at comand.co.uk. I had to have the HDD on my early NTG4 S204 changed by them so I could install maps later than 2014-15 - which they did, installing 2018-19 as part of the deal. I bought the old HDD home and tried to read it with my USB docking thing, not a cat in hell's chance!

Its probably linux, if you have windows you will just see garbage or nothing if it requires root access to read, if its just a bad drive it may be possible to clone the drive but I imagine its coded at serial number level and beyond to prevent folks just popping in a later drive

 

[S500Matt]

I would say changing to an SSD is possible and likely more robust; however, we would need to know what the file system is on the drive and sector by sector clone it. I imagine MB use some sort of proprietary file format which is why it can't be read as exFAT, FAT32 or NTFS in Windows.

The only other way I can think is to take a working drive from another car and clone it.

 

[richard]

The trouble with SSDs is you need to treat them slightly differently to a standard HDD in software teams - and the COMAND is unlikely to know that.
Otherwise you get premature wear on the SSD (they have a limited life, and you need to write across the whole drive rather than concentrating on one spot or the flash wears out - the drive manages this, but I don't think its all simple).

Google "SSD trim"

R

 

[S500Matt]

I get that, but trim is usually for high IOP
workloads with multiple read and writes. For an SSD drive in car used for navigation I fully expect it to be 99.9% read only with only minimal data writes for user metadata such as stored destinations etc.

I would also comment that a spinning traditional hdd has more chance of failure in a car than an SSD drive regardless of flash fatigue.

 

[Doodle]

you would of thought they would of used ssd'd in the 1st place

Consider when these NTG units were first released, and then allow for the fact that the specifications would have been laid down sometime before that. The SSD as we know it was still a relatively new arrival on the scene at that point, and priced accordingly. It's hardly surprising that a car manufacturer will have gone for extensively proven tech with a far lower buy-in.

 

[fabes]

Just to say this has developed into an interesting and informative thread.
I build a few PCs and would have fallen for the same mistaken presumption that any HDD would have worked in there.

The automotive requirements sound like the feature set we had on military spec / grade for in field of operations equipment back when I had involvement in that

 

[SpikyMikey]

Just to say this has developed into an interesting and informative thread.
I build a few PCs and would have fallen for the same mistaken presumption that any HDD would have worked in there.

The automotive requirements sound like the feature set we had on military spec / grade for in field of operations equipment back when I had involvement in that

That reminds me, I still have my old Mil-Spec Panasonic Toughbook somewhere; aka "The Tank"