HDD image for Bose Lifestyle 48

[voivoda]

Hi everybody,

I’m bringing good news to all you guys who suffered with failed BOSE HDD. Further to my post dated 16 August 2011, I managed to make BOSE to recognize and play my WD 160 GB disk!
So, what did I do in the meantime, after 16 August?

- Sent an e-mail to BOSE technical support, which they did not bother to respond.
- Called BOSE service, and BOSE technician told me that the file system is “secret” and that simply copy-paste to new HDD will not work. Nonsense – read further...
- yesterday I went to BOSE service and bought BOSE HDD. It is actually TOSHIBA 40 GB hard drive, almost the same as the one which failed. Here are the details of the failed HDD:
TOSHIBA MK4025GAS HDD 2190 T ZE01 T DC +5V 0.7A

Here are the details of the new drive I bought yesterday:
TOSHIBA MK4032GAX HDD 2010 T ZL01 T DC +5V 1.0A
- I connected the new BOSE HDD to media center and, as expected, everything was Ok, and error messages 801 and 802 are gone.
- Then I disconnected the new drive from media center and connected to my laptop to examine the drive. And here is the “secret”:
Hard disk was formatted with FAT32 and is having TWO PARTITIONS! Here are the partitions details:
Partition 1:
Total bytes: 31,412,312,064 (29GB)
Total sectors: 61,352,172

Partition 2:
Total bytes: 8,595,417,600 (8GB)
Total sectors: 16,787,925

So, knowing this, I connected my 160GB WD 2.5’’ internal HDD (which I purchased for 1/5 of the price of BOSE HDD!) to my laptop and again using Control Panel – Administrative tools – Computer management- Disk management, first I deleted the existing volume on my WD drive, then I created 2 new volumes – for the size of the first volume I entered 29958 MB, and for the second volume 8197 MB. Then I made the first volume ACTIVE. Note that still more than 120GB of my WD drive remained unallocated, since I utilized only 38155 MB (29958+8197).

Then I copied all three folders (DATA, db and MUSIC), which I managed to save before the old BOSE HDD died, back to the first partition (29958 MB). The second partition (8197MB) remains empty.
Just to avoid any potential surprises from BOSE, actual copying I did from command prompt using ROBOCOPY function, which retains the complete time and date stamps of the original files. The syntax was
ROBOCOPY c: h: /s /copy:dat
Where c: was the source drive, h: was the destination drive, /s parameter will copy subfolders and /copy:dat will retain time and date stamps.

Then connected this WD drive to media center and SUCCESS! BOSE is playing all my stored music!
Unfortunately I had to buy new BOSE HDD (which I don’t need now) to discover this. But does not matter.

So you guys, can go to the first computer shop and buy any 2.5’’ internal HDD for 20% of the price you would pay to BOSE. Just take care on the following: my WD, despite it was looking identical to TOSHIBA HDD, was not quite identical. One corner on WD drive was 1mm higher than on TOSHIBA drive – just enough that cover of medial center cannot close properly. But with the help of rasp tool I chamfered the WD drive corner and now fits nicely in media center!

And, for the end, the new BOSE HDD I purchased was having only one folder in the first partition called DATA with only 6 files in it. I presume the other two folders db and MUSIC get created at the moment you press the STORE button to capture your music CD.

Best regards,

DC