Upgraded L5 to an SSD today

Vista Hardware Jands L5
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Thought I’d share a picture of the console tear down I completed today, in case anyone was curious what the inside looks like. I had to open the L5 to upgrade the hard drive to SSD to get it ready for V3. The switch went off without a hitch.

These were the basic steps. AC Lighting gave me instructions on doing the swap. I had to remove a bunch of screws from the back of the console. Once the back panel was off, I disconnected the HHD and then removed 4 screws attaching the mounting bracket to the console. Once the mounting bracket was off, I installed the SSD and then put the drive back into place and reconnected it. With a Windows 10 bootable USB drive, I installed a fresh copy of Windows 10 Pro and the Wacom Tablet driver and then installed Vista V3. Everything seems to be working great so far.

IMG_7453
IMG_7453.jpg3024×4032 2.8 MB

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There are more screws on that back panel than everything else inside combined. :smiley:

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Does Chroma-Q provide the windows 10 copy or do you have to provide that yourself? And was it a special console version of V3?

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It needs to be Windows 10 Pro and we paid for a license. I don’t know if Chroma-Q would be willing to provide one or not.

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The end user is responsible for purchasing a copy of Windows 10 Pro and the SSD drive required for the upgrade.

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Is there a downloadable upgrade sheet? Id like to get mine setup, V3 on my mac runs like a champ!

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This is what they sent me. I believe it’s a draft and obviously upgrading to a beta version is at your own risk.

ADMIN EDIT:
Dropbox link removed as the document contained outdated information. Please email Vistasupport@chroma-q.com to obtain the latest version.

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Thanks! I don’t have to have the console for 90% of what we do now so I’ll probably upgrade it next week.

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Getting ready to do this myself. This may be a silly question but when you installed it, since it’s a different platform did you have to go in and re-patch everything?

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you should not have to if you open the same show as before

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You shouldn’t have to repatch anything. Just make sure you have good backups of your show files. In V3 they’ve changed the file system so that an export is no longer needed, everything is now contained in the showfile. But you may need to export your old show file from V2 to have everything come in correctly. File > Export. Best of luck!

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Upgrade successful and everything works. Thanks guys!

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hey @joeyhalderman, did you happen to locate and successfully install the serial port drivers for your L5? I know I’ll probably never need them or use that port… but the PC builder in me can’t live with the exclamation point next to it in device manager! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Hey Kevin,

I had the same issue. I upgraded a while ago and am having trouble remembering my steps. From what I remember it is a generic driver for the intel motherboard. Here is a link to the utility I downloaded to fix that. Let me know if this works for you.

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Let me start by saying USE WACOM DRIVER 6.3.30-6 NOT 6.3.31-4

We upgraded our L5 to Vista 3 on Monday and ran into a couple of snags. First, after swapping out the SSD for the new SSD, we put the cover back on,put in all the screws, flipped the board over and discovered there was a very noticeable wable from the console, like it was twisted or something. We took out messed with the screws for quite a while before we discovered that the counter the console was sitting on had a bow in it and the console was just fine. After that delay, we installed windows 10 Pro and loaded the newest Wacom driver 6.3.31-4. This yielded undesirable results. The pen interacted with the screen, but the cursor moved in the opposite direction as the pen, as if the X and Y axis were reversed. We tried to open the Wacom utility but it was not finding the Wacom tablet. We deleted and reloaded the drivers several times and still got the same results. We finally decided to try using the older drivers 6.3.30-6 and everything started moving in the right direction. This was a 5 hour ordeal that should have taken only 2 hours. I was ready to put the old drive back in and just go back to Vista 2. Luckily we decided to try the older driver before taking all those screws out again.

We were surprised to find a SSD already installed inside the console. We were also surprised to find very little dust accumulation inside our 3 year old console.

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The correct driver is actually Driver version 6.3.20-7

We have just updated our tech note to explicitly mention this version.

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thanks @joeyhalderman, I’m pretty sure I already tried that (with no luck) – but I’ll give it another shot!

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Hey Jack,

We are upgrading our L5 right now and can’t get ANY version of the Wacom driver to work. Is there a secret to getting it to give options or accept input correctly after the flip?

Thanks!

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Can you confirm that you have uninstalled all other Wacom drivers and have tried.

This one 6.3.20-7

Your L5 will need a restart after the driver installation.

To the best of my knowledge there is no “trick” other than to use that exact driver.

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Yes, I have the latest upgrade doc from Ben, and used the links enclosed in the doc.

In addition, though, the upgrade has been botched.

  1. Initialization issues with the SSD
  2. Installation issues with windows
  3. Firmware updates to the console (console doesn’t shut down after the CPU -lights and faders “stay on”)
  4. System freezing up with no errors reported
  5. Show files not importing/merging correctly out of the v2 load
  6. Wacom issues as stated above

Frankly, it’s been a mess.

I am going to start from scratch today and reinstall the original drive so I can boot it and snag the show files again, (unless there is another way) and then wipe the SSD and start over. No way I would risk this current system on a Sunday. I’m hoping some was just out of whack with the OS install and it snowballed the process.