replacing Mark IV hard drive

[Lloyd Randolph]

The hard drive in my Yamaha Mark IV, a DGC1M4, appears to be failing.

I'd like to replace it with a solid state drive. 

Have any of you succeeded in making such a replacement? If so, would you please send me instructions on how to do this? 

Will the solid state drive depicted below work for this purpose? If not, what should I use instead?

Thanks,

Lloyd Randolph 

[Jim Fitzwilliam]

Hello Lloyd - while that is a parallel interface on the SSD you picture (very hard to find nowadays), it appears that the capacity of that SSD is only 32 GB.  You need a minimum of 80 GB, which is the Disklavier hard drive size. Many folks in this support group have replaced their original hard drives with SSDs. Some of the smallest SSDs out there now are 128 GB. There are documents in the support group that outline how to do this. Maybe some other users here have that document handy and can pass it to you.

Meanwhile, here is a very handy post on a facebook group page where a fellow goes through the upgrade process. It describes the parts and step by step process this fellow followed to upgrade his old hard drive to an SSD.  https://www.facebook.com/groups/27445600903/posts/10157288495285904/

------ Original Message ------

From "Lloyd Randolph" <lhr...@gmail.com>

To "Disklavier Support Group" <disklavier-s...@googlegroups.com>

Date 7/16/2023 2:40:52 PM

Subject replacing Mark IV hard drive

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[Lloyd Randolph]

Thanks for the input I've received on replacing my aging Mark IV's hard drive with a solid state drive, including input from Jim Fitzwilliam and Vincent Lin's how-to postings on SSD upgrades.

With my wife's assistance, I think we've succeeded in copying our piano's hard drive onto a 250 GB Samsung EVO 2.5" SATA.

Vincent's postings suggest extending the data partition in the newly created disk image. This seems wise when (as in my case) the replacement SSD has much greater storage capacity. 

How do I expand the partition containing the data? (Linux is a mystery to me, and I don't have a Linux computer capable of viewing the contents of the image.) One of Vincent's postings says one could "expand the partition after you've restored the backup using gparted or parted." Does this remain the best way to do this? And if so, how does one go about it without a Linux machine?  Do simpler means exist?

Many thanks,

Lloyd Randolph

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[Jim Fitzwilliam]

Good afternoon Lloyd - this should be relatively simple. Linux does not enter into this. Connect and power up your new SSD so that it appears as another disk drive on your Windows computer. There is an excellent chance your computer will "see" the SSD. If your computer does not recognize the SSD, you will have to "mount" the volume. 

1. Press the Win + R keys to open Run, type  diskmgmt.msc into Run, and click/tap on OK to open Disk Management. 

2. Right click or press and hold on the unmounted drive without a drive letter you want to mount, and click/tap on Change Drive Letter and Paths. Follow the prompt to assign a letter.

Now that everything is mounted and visible, go back to Disk Management. Now you can see the your SSD. If you cloned the original 80 GB hard disk, then you will see the SSD drive with a partition that is approximately 80 GB (the partition has hashmarks and probably says something like Healthy (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump). Right click your mouse on that partition and select "Extend Volume". The computer will query itself to see how much space is available on the SSD to extend the active partition. It will then present to you the maximum available so that you can choose that or a smaller number. Choose the maximum and the partition will be increased from the 80 GB to the roughly 250 GB maximum capacity. 

There you go, you can now store "zillions" of songs on your Disklavier. Enjoy!

Jim

------ Original Message ------

From "Lloyd Randolph" <lhr...@gmail.com>

To disklavier-s...@googlegroups.com

Date 8/7/2023 8:56:06 PM

Subject Re: replacing Mark IV hard drive

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[Lloyd Randolph]

Thanks, Jim.

I'll give this a try - but first I need to solve what appears to me to be a more basic problem: my Disklavier is not restarting with the SSD installed. 

When I turn on the I/O (with the newly installed SSD), the big "standby/on" button on the Media Center flashes green but does not move out of this mode. And my PRC100 is not connecting, even after I've removed its battery and tried to re-set the connection. The PRC100's network system info reads, "Network Offline." Moreover, I've plugged the I/0 into my home network, too, and the I/O is not recognizing the network's IP address. And I can't get DKVBrowser to see the Disklavier either.

When I couldn't get the restart to proceed normally via the steps above, I tried pressing the I/O's "re-set" button and the "system install" button, but neither step solved my problem.

As best I can tell, I cloned the Disklavier's hard drive successfully (using Clonezilla's "device-device[:] work directly from a disk or partition to a disk or partition"). Clonezilla dialog lines indicated that it cloned partitions 1,2, 6, 7, 8 and 9 from a disk it labeled "sdc" (the Disklavier's aging hard drive, I think) onto identically numbered partitions of "sdd," which I understand is my new solid state drive. 

Bottom line, I'm flummoxed, apparently at the cloning stage. 

Ideas on how to solve? A few months back, I backed up the Disklavier's files. Could I restore from this? By plugging the back-up into the USB port of the I/O and re-starting?

Many thanks,

Lloyd

P.S. If your email to lloyd.r...@post.harvard.edu generates an error message, please use lhr...@gmail.com instead. (Harvard alumni email currently has some problems with reliability.)

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[James Fitzwilliam]

Lloyd - sounds like you did not make the new SSD a bootable disk. That is usually an option that needs to be selected with some software. I see Clonezilla has limitations including “Online imaging/cloning is not implemented yet. The partition to be imaged or cloned has to be unmounted.” Quote from clonezilla.org.

You can check if it is a bootable disk by going to Disk Management, and looking at the partitions next to the disk name. In the hashed partition, it should say Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Basic Data Partition. If Boot is missing, that disk is not bootable.

In which case, you will have to reclone with the original HDD. I have never used Clonezilla. I use Macrium Reflect (macrium.com), which has always served me well. 

Years ago, when I cloned my HDD, I used a hardware solution. I bought a product called EZ-Clone (USI-2535CLU3), made by Kingwin. It is a 2.5 & 3.5 inch hard drive duplicator, with offline one touch clone/duplicator function. I plugged the HDD into the IDE source, and the new SSD into the target connector, and pushed a button. Like 20 minutes later, it was done. That little device performed the cloning perfectly. It costs $30.00. I just checked and Amazon still sells it.

Hope this helps.

Jim

Sent from iPad

On Aug 8, 2023, at 1:24 PM, Lloyd Randolph <lhr...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Geoff Ward]

Hi Lloyd

 

Some years ago I cloned the HDD of my Mark IV to a 120GB SATA SSD.  The software I used was EaseUS Todo Backup.  I think you can still get it for free, but I have since purchased it because it is good and I used it a lot for my monthly system backups.  However, to get reliable boot disks I have to clone the whole disk sector by sector, which is an option under EaseUS ToDo.  Certainly, it won’t work as a boot disk if you just clone a partition.  You have to clone the whole disk and I find that a sector by sector clone is the most reliable.  I also used a cheap adapter to mate the SATA SSD with the DKV PATA interface.  This was also a bit hit and miss.  The first one I purchased didn’t work.  I purchased a different adapter and it worked.

 

I hope this helps.  You will get there, as many of us have.

 

One final point.  My DKV failed some year ago with the SSD in place.  Basically a power supply failed and cooked the computer.  A new mother board fixed the problem.  At that time, I reinstalled the original HDD and have never gotten around to reinstalling the SSD.  I did check the SSD and it still worked.  I found that the benefits of the SSD were minor.  The time for boot-up did not decrease much – 2:30 to about 2:10 (from memory only a 20 second saving).  This is probably caused by the speed limitation of the PATA interface.  The only real benefit, in my case, was to get rid of the annoying HDD hum.

 

Can others comment on the time saving please?  Maybe my experience was caused by the cheap PATA to SATA adapter.  I’m hoping that Yamaha Japan will eventually make the DKC 900 upgrade available in Australia.  At the moment it’s not available.

 

Kind regards

 

Geoff

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[Lloyd Randolph]

Thanks, Jim and Geoff for this excellent advice!

I've now successfully replaced my aging hard drive with a 250 GB
solid-state drive by making a sector-by-sector clone with EaseUS Todo
and successfully booted the SSD on my MarkIV.

With a bit of fiddling with IP address settings, I've also managed to
restore my Disklavier's connections to both my PRC-100 and DKVBrowser.
The hum emanating from my piano's speakers (a sign, I think, of a
forthcoming hard drive failure) has disappeared! Hallelujah!

So far I've not reallocated space on the SSD in the sector containing
music files. I couldn't see how to do this with even the paid version
of EaseUS ToDo. I have enough space on the existing sector with midi
files for now. At some point, I may want to expand this sector into
the unused portion of the SSD. Is GParted the best method to do this?
Can it GParted be run on a Windows machine with the piano's new SSD
plugged into a USB jack?

Lloyd
On Tue, Aug 8, 2023 at 6:22 PM 'Geoff Ward' via Disklavier Support

> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/disklavier-support-group/000501d9ca46%24ca6e2d80%245f4a8880%24%40bigpond.com.

[Lloyd Randolph]

And a further follow-up question: once the last partition on the SSD fills up with midi files, would attempting to add more such files simply mean that they'd be stored in the unpartitioned portion of the drive? If so, why is changing the size of the partition where such files are stored necessary?

Lloyd

P.S. If your email to lloyd.r...@post.harvard.edu generates an error message, please use lhr...@gmail.com instead. (Harvard alumni email currently has some problems with reliability.)

[James Fitzwilliam]

As far as your piano computer knows, it only has access to 80 GB of storage through the existing partition. It has no clue that there is another 160 GB available. That is why you have to extend the existing partition. Your piano computer’s software only recognizes one partition.

Sent from iPad

On Aug 9, 2023, at 12:07 PM, Lloyd Randolph <lhr...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Geoff Ward]

That's good news Lloyd,

Can you please tell me how long it now takes to boot up and how long to shut down. As I mentioned, on my Mark IV, the difference wasn't what I had hoped for.

Kind regards

Geoff

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[Lloyd Randolph]

Thanks, Geoff and others for the insights and encouragement in replacing my Disklavier's HDD with a SSD.  

In response to Geoff's question, using the standby/on button on my Disklavier's Media Center to turn the device on and off, and gauging boot time by whether this button's green light had turned solid (after flashing) and shut-down time by whether this button's light was off, I timed the following:

boot-up: 3:10

shut-down: 0:52

While I didn't time boot-up and shut-down with the HDD in place, these times for boot-up and shut-down with the SSD don't seem much better than with the HDD. But this doesn't bother me, as my goals were to replace the HDD before it failed and eliminate the associated hum in my speakers. 

I remain interested in advice on extending the partition of my cloned SSD partition containing midi files to cover the SSD's remaining unused portion. EaseUS Partition Master (even the paid version) did not work for me. This, even though EaseUS Partition Master did not find errors in the SSD, and even though EaseUS Partition Master claims to work with fat32 files.

Lloyd

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[Owen Sayers]

Hi Lloyd

I’ve always found Mini Tools Partition Wizard Free v 12.7 very good as it contains very helpful  tutorials to guide you about doing all sorts with partitions.   You can get it from http://www.PartitionWizard.com

Best wishes

Owen

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[Geoff Ward]

Hi Lloyd

 

I didn’t expand my partition as 80GB is plenty.  I don’t keep many midi files on the drive as I play the DKV from my laptop using USB and from my iPad using the midi inputs.

 

I have however used the Minitool Partition Wizard on general PC stuff and it works well.

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