this is my new used broken Lyra, model 2825a, similar to the 2825, 2840, and 2826. Possibly others also.
The drive was bad in this unit. I only paid $30 for it on ebay,
so that didn't bother me. I already had a 10gb drive that I had
bought used and installed in my old Toshiba laptop, as I was using it
as an mp3 player in the garage. The plan is to remove the bad
drive, install the good drive, and have a useable device for cheap.
To diassemble the Lyra, first remove the two screws on the
bottom. On mine someone had already been inside it, so these
screws were loose and the anti-tamper pin was half broken off. I
just used a small hex wrench and unscrewed them. You might find
the correct tool at a big electronics store such as Frye's. Once
the screws are removed, use a knife or other dangerous implement to pry
the case apart. These pics should give you an idea of what you
are trying to accomplish. Hopefully you won't break off the
plastic tabs.
Almost there!
This is what yu'll find inside. The battery had been dislodged in
this unit, you should have to unsolder the copper shield from either
side to get it loose.
I put some tape on the metallic plated case to prevent the pins from shorting, as the battery is charged! Be careful.
Unsolder the five wires that are connected to the shield.
Now you can remove the hard drive! Carefully unplug it, use your
fingernail to separate the plug from the drive, and carefully pull it
off. The rubber shield should pull off the drive, then you can
remove the four screws, cut the tape, and peel the copper sticky shield
from the drive. ONLY do this if you are replacing the
drive! for example if it is defective, or you want to
install a larger (or smaller) hard drive. Hint: partition
and format the drive using a laptop, by installing the drive in the
laptop and using a Windows 98SE boot disk to run fdisk and
format.com. I used the /z:64 switch to make sure the cluster size
was large.
This is the original drive in the 20gb unit. This particular one
doesn't even make a sound at power up, the previous owner stated that
it the device had fallen onto a concrete driveway!
This is the battery. You can buy a replacement for it on ebay for
about $20, they are used in the 1st generation ipod. Soldering is
required.
Here you have the circuit board...this should give all the info you need to hack the software, I hope!
