Rio Carbon 5Gb recovery

[isakov45]

Hello everyone, I have 2 rio carbon in poor condition.
1. The battery has lost capacity. Its dimensions are 6mm * 19mm * 47mm.
2. There are glitches during operation: turning off the player, disk error.
I want to replace the battery. I found a 6.5mm * 20mm * 40mm 800mAh battery in China.
I also want to replace the 5 Gb hard drive with a CF card.

Wikipedia states:
The Rio Carbon, along with all of Rio's Microdrive-based players, can be modified to run on Compact Flash cards instead of hard disk. This requires a partial disassembly of the unit, removing the Microdrive, replacing it with a compatible CF card, and then formatting the memory and loading the device firmware. Compatible CF cards must be 8GB or less, and must have TrueATA / TrueIDE mode capability. This mod will increase speed and responsiveness of the player, along with making it more durable and increasing battery life. The 8GB limit is due to the 24-bit addressing in the firmware.
Some confirmed compatible cards:
Sandisk CF Ultra II 1GB / 2GB
Sandisk CF Ultra 8GB
Sandisk CF Ultra II 4GB

Did someone install a larger CF card?

 

[deanhuff]

Did you complete the battery swap and flash install? I’m considering doing the same modifications. Do you have a source for the replacement battery?

 

[deanhuff]

I've completed my upgrade. Once I inserted the CF card and started the device the screen said "upgrader". I had to use an XP VM to get the firmware restored. If you are using the VM method, shut it down and make the USB device forward on VM boot automatically. From there I installed 3.04 Developer's Cut Firmware and everything works. Transfers to the device are quite slow but that could be my CF card. Reads are just about instant and I won't be re-writing music often so no big issues for me.

Note you can only use a max 8GB card due to 24bit addressing used in the device firmware.