Mystery USB port (factory installed) next to my CD slot

[tagew]

Hi,

I just (two days ago) received my Gen III Prius. It's of the 'executive' flavor here in Europe. Don't know what it translates to in the US.

This morning I was struggling to find out how to insert a CD in to the player. Didn't have the manual on hand so I had to look for help and found a video linked from this forum that showed how to push the load button so the display flips over and shows the CD slot. In the video, there were two slots - one for CDs and one for the navigation disc.

When I tried this in my car, there was just one slot and s small lid that said HDD update. I lifted it and found something that I thought was a USB connector (woohoo!), but on closer exam it more resembles a mini FireWire connector.

Has anybody else seen this? With it's placement it's obviously not meant for use with an iPod or something, but I thought that maybe you can load the onboard music hard drive from the usb/firewire/whatever thingie instead of from the CD.

Thankful for info.

Tage
Stockholm, Sweden

[tagew]

Update: I took a photo of the mystery port in question, but I can't seem to add it here until I've made 5 posts. Ping me if you want to take a look before that.

/Tage

[Manksgloob]

Hm, by chance could it be a way for your dealer to update the maps in your HDD-based NAV system?

[qbee42]

From your description, your car has a hard disk navigation system, so no slot for the DVD. The data connector is for loading map and system updates.

Tom

[tagew]

Thanks for your replies. That's what I thought too, but since the navigation share the hard drive with the entertainment system, I hoped to be able to access the mp3 library using the FireWire port.

It would be really convenient to just copy my music library onto the hard drive rather than having to rip all mp3s again. Not to mention all legally purchased downloaded tunes that I can't seem to transfer to the hard drive on CDs.

I did a bold attempt last night and hooked up the firewire port to my computer. No go. I tried with power off (in the car) and power on but neither worked. No disk mounted and the computer couldn't gather info on what was connected on the FireWire port.

I tried the reverse thing and booted up the mac in target disk mode - effectively turning it into a FireWire drive and hoped that the car would somehow mount that drive, but to no avail...

There's probably some secret button combination needed to allow access to the drive.

Any guesses?
/Tage

[qbee42]

Could be. It would make sense, but since we don't have that system here I have no idea. Generally data ports like that are set up to look like removable drives when attached to a computer - plug them in and they magically appear. However, it is possible to have a port that requires proprietary software on the host computer.

Tom

[StephUK]

Hi,

From the French Prius board, the connector is clearly a mini Firewire but nothing detected on Windows and "Unrecognised" (or equivalent) when connected to a Mac.

Some people will now try with the unit switched in setup/engineer mode (apparently press the "display" button and switch light on/off 5x times.

I can't test it myself until.... I got my Prius, hopefully next week :-)

[tagew]

StephUK - finally some progress! Engineer mode. So you hold the display button and then switch the headlights on and off? Or some other lights?

/Tage

[mastercut]

maybe would be right to use a raw data rescue software to back up all the HDD.
i need a firewire cable and i will use DATA RECOVERY WIZAR .
Stay tuned!!!!