Is it possible to repair or replace Columbus hard drive?

[shakermaker]

You can only ask, I suppose. But warranty won't cover something 7 years old I'm afraid, so more likely to be a goodwill gesture if anything. Then again, a goodwill gesture of 50% is still £900 when a second hand unit will cost much less than that.

 

Edit: And yours sounds more like main board failure than hard drive. That's a scrap unit really, as mainboards are either unavailable, or 500 euros to buy.

 

Ouch. That's me f***ed then! I defy them to explain how something which has been used entirely within manufacturer's spec, is entirely unmodified, can just "fail" so suddenly and need to cost such a bomb to fix, when I have stereos in other cars that are 20+ years old working spot on. Sure, there's no complex computer bits, but computers don't just fail without warning unless there is a user input error (which there has not been).

[Rustynuts]

Electronics fail. Unfortunately, that's just what happens. Yours being one of the earlier units they were particularly prone to failure, while the later ones are much more robust.

[Sotosound]

Electronics fail. Unfortunately, that's just what happens. Yours being one of the earlier units they were particularly prone to failure, while the later ones are much more robust.

 

If you check out the Honest John car-by-car review of the Superb 2 on the web, the failure of Columbus units is even mentioned there.

 

As you'll see from this thread, Mr Rusty Nuts supplied me with a nice 2012 unit for a good price and, to be honest, this unit knocked spots off the original 2009 unit.

[Taximark]

I had an issue with my columbus where it went into German mode and you couldn't alter anything ...took it to bickerton skoda and they fixed it for 40 quid, turned out it just needed new firmware and updating.

[iansplace]

HI, Having a massively frustrating time with this. Trying to replace the hard drive in my Columbus with an SSD due to repeated slow start/failure to load navigation, especially when cold. Was hoping to clone the drive to the SSD but kept getting an I/O message when connecting the original drive to my computer. So fitted new drive, and refitted unit to car, to discover music cd in drive which wouldn't eject. Had to refit original hard drive, after which cd ejected fine. Ran firmware disc just to check which went ok. Then refitted SSD and reinstalled in car again. Inserted firmware disc which wouldn't run and now won't eject either!  What can I try next?

Questions:

Should the ssd have been formatted on the PC before installation, if so as FAT32 or NTFS? (I initialised it but didn't format it)

Is there any way to force the firmware disc to run?

Can I force eject the disc without having to rebuild it all again with the original drive? (though I'm getting pretty slick at it now!)

Any assistance gratefully accepted, other wise I'll carry on with my el cheapo Stream which I put in when the Columbus first started playing up

 

[chimaera]

39 minutes ago, iansplace said:

HI, Having a massively frustrating time with this. Trying to replace the hard drive in my Columbus with an SSD due to repeated slow start/failure to load navigation, especially when cold. Was hoping to clone the drive to the SSD but kept getting an I/O message when connecting the original drive to my computer. So fitted new drive, and refitted unit to car, to discover music cd in drive which wouldn't eject. Had to refit original hard drive, after which cd ejected fine. Ran firmware disc just to check which went ok. Then refitted SSD and reinstalled in car again. Inserted firmware disc which wouldn't run and now won't eject either!  What can I try next?

Questions:

Should the ssd have been formatted on the PC before installation, if so as FAT32 or NTFS? (I initialised it but didn't format it)

Is there any way to force the firmware disc to run?

Can I force eject the disc without having to rebuild it all again with the original drive? (though I'm getting pretty slick at it now!)

Any assistance gratefully accepted, other wise I'll carry on with my el cheapo Stream which I put in when the Columbus first started playing up

 

What tool are you using to clone the drive? There's a good possibility the filesystem on the drive is proprietary which would cause problems with any high level cloning tools on a PC. I would suggest using a low-level cloning tool like dd, and ensuring that the PC does not try to mount and/or format the original disk before cloning.

[iansplace]

I never got as far as cloning the drive which was my original intent as I couldn't get the PC to read the original drive so reverted to installing blank drive and then attempting(!) to install firmware. Can't believe I wasted a whole day on this!

 

[chimaera]

43 minutes ago, iansplace said:

I never got as far as cloning the drive which was my original intent as I couldn't get the PC to read the original drive so reverted to installing blank drive and then attempting(!) to install firmware. Can't believe I wasted a whole day on this!

 

That's my point: the disk has a proprietary file system that your PC doesn't know how to read. The good news is it doesn't need to be able to once it can detect that the hardware is there.

 

Go to Start->Run and type 'diskmgmt.msc' to bring up the disk manager (assuming you're on Windows). Look for a disk there with no volume information or assigned drive letter. That should be your drive. If the drive is connected and spinning but not showing up here it's near death's door.

 

If it shows up and you want to clone it, it's possible but needs particular software to copy across the raw data between the drives.

 

A quick search on Google turned up this howto which suggests it's possible to initialise a blank drive in the unit itself but you have to make sure any jumpers are removed from the new drive before fitting. https://www.vwwatercooled.com.au/forums/f78/rns-510-hdd-replacement-ssd-swap-diy-60984.html

[blouis79]

My hard drive failed - presume corruption. Wnet into german mode and didn't function. Planning on changing to SSD, but ran into issues. Firmware update CD re-initialised orignal HDD and still working fine for several months.

 

Proprietary file system setup seems near impossible to fix with usual third party tools.