Have I Got This Straight ?

[Carn]

Hi there guys, awesome forum you guys have got going and kudo's to all of your efforts to get this working. Hopefully I will be able to at some point make a usefull contribution to this site.

Some info before I start. I have a 2006 Mk 5 GTI on order with the Phatbox system as an optional extra that will be arriving in mid April. I have only ordered the 20GB version and have over 60Gb worth of music I want to copy to it to play in my car. I am going to purchase a 80/100GB western digital notebook drive to upgrade the cartridge in my Phatbox system.

I have a few questions after reading through some of the posts on the site, that hopefully someone will be able to answer for me.

Do I need a 2mb or 8mb notebook drive ?
5400rpm or 7200rpm ?
Jumpers or no jumpers, master/slave or cs ?

As far as the process goes tell me if I have this in order.

1. Plug in usb cradle and boot pc from v1.5 iso CD (This ISO btw contains no data if mounted with Daemon tools ?)
2. Boot into Linux system from CD and insert original cartridge.
3. Insert original cartridge into cradle and wait for green writing to stop.
4. ALT F2 to enter DMS Hack section.
4. Backup cartridge and confirm its working by hitting enter.
5. Copy patch/update scripts to cartridge by hitting enter again.
6. Remove cartridge and put it inot the Phatbox in the car.
7. Turn on the ignition and radio and wait for speech/no speech then go to playlist 2
---This is where being a VW I need to turn on/off the ignition and radio 10-20 times to make sure the process completes successfully
8. Remove the cartridge and go back inside.
9. Open the cartridge and replace the 20GB drive with the new 80/100GB unit.
10.Insert the cartridge into the cradle and wait for it to initialize.
11.The process of partitioning, formatting and backup takes place.
12.Turn off PC and boot into windows.
13.Copy music to cartridge and then hope for the best when returning to the car.

Being a VW is there anything else special/particular I need to do in order to make sure it will work or is the whole process a case of hit and miss/pray for the best ?

Im hoping it will work 1st time but honestly what are the chances ?

Once again thanks for a most informative site and I look forward to getting this thing working.

 

[markbowen]

An 8mb 5400rpm drive will be sufficient.  You can use any make but Toshiba (which is what Phatnoise use) and Seagate are better quality (this from one with a Hitachi drive).

As for the hack CD, right, you won't see any data if you view it in Windows, but it's there.  Once you boot from the CD, the rest of the procedure is very clear, with lots of prompts and warnings.  Doing the procedure with the CD is pretty much fail-safe.  All necessary files should get copied to the original DMS as well as the new one.

If you look through the forum, you'll see that where most users have problems is in getting the patch to execute on the box.  Some confusion is caused by information in the prompts on the CD.  It will tell you it's going to copy a playlist to the original DMS, but that's not what it does.  So, don't expect it to play the first playlist, just let it run and it will tell you when (or if) the patch has been completed.  Some people do get it on the first go, so good luck.  

[judb]

Frequently the phatboxes crash the patcher up during the patching process and you have to restart the phatbox a few times.

In some cases the phatbox gets to a point where almost everything is patched and it expects a corrupted ramdisk.sig or it wont boot.  so you may have to do that if your box freaks out at a specific point in time.  its easy to do..  just copy another .sig file over ramdisk.sig (make a backup first) and you'll be fine.

[Carn]

Thanks guys, much appreciated. Im keeping my fingers crossed that it'll work 1st time.

I know its a bit off topic but can some explain to me in a little more detail how the Phatbox system actualy works ? I have read all the stuff at www.phatnoise.com but I wan't to know how the music is arranged on the drive and so on. The reason I ask is that I have all my albums in folders with the album name and the tracks are all named Track 01, 02, ect. I didn't want to go the iPod route due to the fact that I can only have 5 folders with music on. Will the Phatbox allow me to copy all of my album folders to the drive and then will I be able to scroll through them via the radio with the name of each folder being announced by the voice prompts ? Are the voice prompts customizable or is it in a set voice so to speak and does it sound ok ?

Sorry if I ask alot of questions but this is a totally new system to me and not many people here in SA have even heard of it.

Thanks again guys for a brilliant site,

[markbowen]

When you open the Phatnoise software, you will tell it in what folders to search for music on your computer.  When you copy the music to your DMS, it will be organized on the DMS in the same folders and sub-folders as on your computer, including the entire directory.

However, it doesn't matter how the folders are organized, because the Phatbox won't read them that way.  You'll use the software to create up to 999 playlists on the DMS.  It's up to you how you do that -- you can organize the playlists by artist, by album, genre, etc.  Using the SSA voice prompts you can navigate by playlist, artist, album, genre, and then by track.  As for the voices, you get two ATT Natural Voices with the VW software, and they sound fine.

You can get answers to a lot of your questions by downloading the Phatbox User's Manual:
http://www.phatnoise.com/downloads/phatbox_users_manual.pdf

Info on the VW phatbox also found here:
http://www.phatnoise.com/vw/