Got a 80GB Hitachi Travelstar 5400rpm laptop drive from ebay for a good deal, so I went for it. FYI this is for an Audi Phatbox connected to a Symphony HU.
The hack process was not without problems though, see below.
I used the Hack/repair CD ISO v1.5 downloaded from judb's folder at the download area. This CD booted fine and I went through the procedures documented in the wiki to patch the original 20gb DMS, and this went without any errors. When I loaded this DMS into the car, it started up and began playing music. I played the first several playlists and they all played music. I didn't hear a voice prompt telling me that the hack was done. At any rate, the docs seem to say that this is normal, so I just assumed that all went well.
Then, I swapped to the new 80gb drive in the DMS and set it up while still booted on the hack/repair CD (according to the wiki). This also went without apparent error. I rebooted into windows and resync'ed/saved the music onto it via PMM. But, after putting the new DMS in the car, it did not want to play. The green LED on the box blinks a bunch of times, and the radio switches out of CD mode. The box continues to blink its lights until I powered off the radio.
Searching through the forum I came across the post by Genesis about VW/Audi boxes (in
this thread). Thinking that perhaps I had the same problem, so I went ahead did what he recommended. This means starting from scratch again on the new DMS and re-syncing with PMM, etc. Still, the resultant new DMS didn't work on the phatbox (same symptoms as before).
I put back the old drive into the DMS and began examining the contents, and it became apparent that the firmware hack did not occur. The flacplay program was replaced with the hack script, but the p0.* files did not get copied over to the appropriate place in the phtdata\Profiles\Default directory. There were also no log files showing any evidence that the hack procedure actually ran. I think there is a bug somewhere on the hack/repair v1.5 CD that caused this problem.
I manually copied the p0.* files from the backup directory into the phtdta\Profiles\Default directory, and redid the patch on the phatbox. This time, the patch worked, but I still didn't hear a voice announcement about its completion. I examined the patch log files on the disc after the patch, and they indicate that the patch did occur (albeit with lots of "unverified" messages, probably normal).
Swapping the new 80gb disc back into the DMS once more, it worked. Since rebuilding the new DMS using Genesis's instructions causes everything on it to be initialized from scratch, all the customizations in my various .ini files were lost and the voice prompts reverted to the PMM-generated ones rather than the ones from PhatVoice. Also, I was getting "Corrupt track" announcements when I hit "Scan" to have it tell me what I'm listening to. It turns out that PMM did not generate the phtsys\tts\title.mp3 file which is needed for this function.
So, I swapped back to the original 20gb drive again to retrieve my old .ini files and the missing title.mp3 file, and then swapped yet again to the new drive to restore them. I also deleted all phtdta\tts\*.wav files and re-ran PhatVoice to regenerate my voice prompts. I then rebooted to Linux and ran my phatsort script (see
this thread about it) to fix the various artists sorting problem.
Finally, everything is now good.
