this hack goes out to charlie… it’s not for the faint of heart, but with some careful dremeling you can double the capacity of your Rio Karma to 40GB. photos live here. please be careful with this one – you don’t wanna end up with any bad karma. ;>
Does anyone know if this fixes the Rio Karma’s hard disk crashes? (which I have found can be “unstuck” by slamming the Karma onto a hard surface, causing a disk read error; scary…)
And is he seriously suggesting taping the Karma back together when finished?!? How ghetto…
I think the lockup is a Karma firmwire problem, but I’ve tried several different lockups though, most can be resolvede by hardresetting it by stickin a pin in at the bottom, right beside the USB connecter..
Oh, does anyone know of other Karma hacks? I use the Java interface, and it sucks big time
solution: sell it and get a better mp3 player like i did.
another solution i found in the forums for fixing a locked hdd was to “hit it firmly but not too firmly”
WOW! Thanks! I love this site!
Spanking / hardresetting works only to a point — I am on my third Karma, after the first two hard drives locked up and had to be replaced… I would be leery of drilling into one — too damn fragile.
I think i have a hack for the karma, not sure if anyone has done it before but i think i can replace the hard drive with the 4gb found i ipod mini, not as much memory, but u still have your good karma, and cool little case, one i try it, if it works ill send it in
Why don’t you just buy a bigger hard drive? the Karma uses a Hitachi Travelstar C4K40, which you can buy with 40gb. I found one for $140 on pricewatch. That way, there’s no need to dremel anything.
HELP. my rio karma (i’m on my second one. argh) is frozen again and is making annoying clicking noise. I figured out that slamming it works (actually figured that one out by accident.) but it doesn’t work any more. any clue how to fix???
Hi!
I took my karma apart. As I was putting it back together, I stopped after re-installing the LCD screen to check things out. I know I am getting power to the screen because it lights up when I power up or down or when I use the joystick. But I am not getting any images. I have reset the karma and re-flashed the firmware. It functions normally except for the screen. Is there a special way of feeding the screen’s cable ribbon into its connection?
Thanks for any advice you can give me.
HEY EVERYONE WITH HARD DRIVE PROBLEMS. This is not a problem with the hard drive. Take a look at your LI-ion battery pack. Is it slightly swollen or bulged? Yeah, mine too. Turns out if you take the back off and fire it up, your hard drive magically works again, as the back casing is no longer pressing the swollen battery against the hard drive casing hard enough to lock the arm with the read head. You need to get a new battery. Here’s the test: Take the back off. If it works again, you need a new battery. Slamming works by temporarily freeing it up a little but just as my advice I don’t recommend banging any kind of hard drive around under any circumstances huh? Batteries on eBay for like, twenty bucks shipped. Can just splice red and black wires on, and that third thing (temp sensor?) is just taped onto the cover. Cheers!
Hitting my Karma worked for about a year then the clicking noise wouldn’t stop and I just let it die. I’ve moved onto the iPod with FLAC converted to ALAC.
the button to turn it on was not working anymore, after 6 years, so a friend who is a technician, opened it and we saw that the small switch to turn it on inside was broken, he welded the 2 contacts to 2 metal cables (each one)that were outside the machine to be able to turn it on(or turn it off) whenever I wanted. The fact is that I used it for a day and somehow the cables were in contact till it drained completely (so if you do this don’t let the cables go outside so much of the device, just a little … and turn it on with a piece of metal like a clip -to make contact with the 2 endings of metal-) … so I charged it but there I was that the first image that appears when you turn it on wasn’t completely charging , wasn’t starting and there was that sound like a cd not playing … yes I had to bring it to my friend again to open it .. and he did it and took off the hard disk and he connected it to another device and there was the sound again … so the problem was there. And we could turn on the Rio without the hard disk but just starting image was displayed… and nothing else could be done with the machine..(and my battery wasn’t bulged or so as someone says here, so that must be another problem.
So, if you have a Rio karma you shouldn’t move so much with it has a hard disk and , as you know hard disks can’t be moved so much otherwise you have this problems… I guesss that when my friend opened it (even we were very careful)somehow the hard disk became fragile and the rio ran down.
That is my experience. So if anybody knows where to buy a hard disk that would work in the rio karma please tell me.
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Does anyone know if this fixes the Rio Karma’s hard disk crashes? (which I have found can be “unstuck” by slamming the Karma onto a hard surface, causing a disk read error; scary…)
And is he seriously suggesting taping the Karma back together when finished?!? How ghetto…