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For my first Kronos K2 73, I decided to upgrade to a 250GB primary drive, and add a secondary 250GB drive as well while I was at it. Researching what others had done, I saw many posts indicating some opting for 120GB drives, some using 500GB, and at least one who successfully used a 1TB drive. For my usage I figured 250+250 was more than sufficient, and now nearly a year later that seems to have held true.

I bought the SSK DK100 USB 3.0 to SATA Dual-Bay External Hard Drive Docking Station, linked below, to make the cloning and connecting processes simple:

https://www.amazon.com/SSK-Aluminum-Ext ... B07WS59SP4

This device features a built-in clone function which will make an identical copy of the original drive onto a new SSD drive.

For my application, I opted to buy the Crucial MX500 SSD drives – they were a good price point, had respectable performance and reliability specifications, and seemed to have several others who had been satisfied with that brand for this application. Whatever you do, should you choose to install a replacement drive, be sure that you choose a good brand.

I’ve now bought a second K2 73 (after having bought a K2 88 back in March) to keep at our rehearsal facility and to use for gigging once things open back up. I got a great deal on the nearly unused 88 with the plan to be able to sync my data between the two, but I found it to be cumbersome to migrate Programs and Samples to the 88 and searched once again for a mint K2 73 to replace it.

For the second K2 73, I only need a single SSD drive as I do my development and backups on the other Kronos, so I bought another Crucial MX500 from Amazon for this upgrade.

Here are the steps I used to clone and expand the new drive:

1. Remove and insert the original SSD drive in the REAR bay on the DK100 - **** FAILURE TO INSERT THE DRIVES IN THE CORRECT BAYS WILL IRREVOCABLY WIPE THE ORIGINAL HARD DRIVE AND REQUIRE RECOVERY FROM DVD MEDIA AND RE-AUTHORIZATION BY KORG *****
2. Power up the DK100
3. Press and hold the clone button for 5 seconds, then release the button

The DK100 will begin the cloning process, and the light strip on the front of the device will indicate the progress. For this instance, the cloning process took about 8 minutes.

Once the cloning has completed, power down the DK100 and remove the original hard drive. I’d suggest storing it in a secure location so that it can be retrieved in the future should it be necessary.

Take the new hard drive out of the enclosure and reconnect it to the Kronos hard drive cable. Be sure that the drive is insulated from anything which might conduct, and power on the Kronos. I have my Kronos sitting on two TV trays with padding, so I can watch the display from underneath while it goes through the boot sequence. Validate that it successfully initializes and boots fully before moving to the next step – this will save much grief should the cloning process have been unsuccessful.

Once the Kronos has booted, power it back down and remove the new SSD. Insert it in the rear bay of the enclosure, and connect the USB cable to your computer of choice. In my case, I’m using a Windows 10 laptop computer.

There are a number of utilities which can be used to expand the hard drive partition – GParted is a popular free option, and there are plenty of posts and videos available from users who have done so. Here are the steps I followed to expand the partition so that the new hard drive could use all of the allocated space:

1. Downloaded the GParted for i686 ISO image
2. Burned the ISO to a DVD – there are options to create bootable USB/memory cards also, but I opted to use a DVD
3. Connected the enclosure via USB
4. Inserted the SSD drive in bay A
5. Powered up the DK100 enclosure
6. Booted my laptop with the GParted Live ISO disc
7. Launched GParted with the defaults
8. Selected the SSD disk from the drive selector

The original hard drive was a Innodisk 3ME3 Series SSD. Here were the original partition attributes: Within GParted, I performed the following actions:

1. Clicked /dev/sdb4
2. Clicked Partition
3. Clicked Resize/Move
4. Clicked Apply
5. Clicked OK
6. Clicked /dev/sdb3
7. Clicked Partition
8. Clicked Resize/Move
9. Dragged the slider to consume the entire free space
10. Clicked Apply
11. Clicked OK
12. Exited GParted and shut down the laptop

Once those steps were complete, I powered off the enclosure and removed the SSD drive. I connected the drive to the Kronos and booted to validate that it was functional and that the additional disk space was available.

Once validated, I powered down the Kronos, installed the new drive, and reinstalled the bottom cover.

The whole process should take an hour or less.

I want to commend you for a great post here.

How is it going nowadays?

By my count, you have two K2 73s and a Kronos 88. Do you interchange the same programs, combis & songs between the three keyboards via USB ?

My 1st gen K73 (9 yrs old) is back in shop because of a recurring power failure problem. I'm considering diving into it myself.

Thanks. It is going pretty well. However, I sold off the 88 to buy the second 73 so that the file management is seamless.

Hard drives are working great, and having the second drive in my primary works great as it gives me another storage location for my back-ups - I’m pretty religious in that respect as I’d hate to lose all the work I put into it (and I’ve read plenty of posts lamenting losing much or all and having to start over).

I’m having an issue which I suspect originates with the power supply on my newer K2, so I ordered a replacement just today from Full Compass (as suggested by Sweat in my other thread). They are back ordered, but I got a response today stating that they expect them back in stock in the next week or two.

They’re pretty simple to work on if you have basic competency with hand tools, IMHO, and for the most part pretty straightforward from a functional perspective. Your issue may be similar, and IMO $200 is a worthwhile expenditure.

Good luck with yours - enjoy!

My recurring power failure problem was (last July) the P/S quit, so my Korg Service guy replaced it - part was $235 plus labor. So I thought I'd be Ok for another 8 or 9 years (lol) but 3 weeks ago it started doing "it" again - blacking out, power quitting, without warning. No warning messages. Same problem.

So the K is back with Service. I'll let you know what happens. If you care to elaborate at all on your problem I'd be interested to know what happens.

Good luck.

Mine sounds similar. I was at a rehearsal a few weeks ago or so, and while it wasn’t a very hot day (low 70’s) I was set up in an unprotected area with no shade. Typically my guitar player (his house) has put up a tarp behind me in the past, but this time we didn’t think it was necessary.

The late afternoon sun was beating down on my keyboards, however, and the black case made it even worse. We were playing a song when it shut down out of the blue without warning. I also noticed that the display on my TeX up top was somewhat washed out, so I figured they were overheated.

I tried restarting a few times but got an error each time indicating that it couldn’t start up.

The next day I set it up in my house and it loaded on the second attempt - I’m sure that the filesystem had to complete a fsk.

I ran it for a couple of days straight and it stayed up just fine. I was practicing about a week after this happened, and it inexplicably shut down again.

The next day I flipped it over and pulled the cover, checked all of the connectors, reseated the RAM, and gave it a good VIP and didn’t find anything amiss. I pulled the end cap and hooked it up to a monitor to watch for error messages during the boot process, and it started fine on the second attempt (likely fsk again). I turned it off and on probably 20 times afterward over a few hours and never encountered another issue so I buttoned it back up.

I left it running for 5 days straight without a hiccup.

About two weeks later I was practicing again on that Kronos and it shut down abruptly once more.

After the second shutdown I decided to make that one my home unit and use the other one for rehearsals and future gigging. I’m fairly certain the replacement PS will stabilize it, and at least if it does shut down it isn’t going to impact a performance.

Great SSD upgrade thread thanx! I’ve just bought the clone box and upgraded both our desktop Win10 machines to SSD using it.
For the K the Gparted bit is worth gold!!

Regarding your intermittent fault:-
Do you use a UPS? And does the fault only occur when you don’t.
Mains power quality can be a problem for the K as I’m sure you know.

Otherwise I’d be suspicious of blaming the PSU, especially since it’s been replaced.

If it can be related to moving the K or heavy playing I‘d suspect a dry joint on the MoBo.. Or a loose / tarnished connector pin. I know you’ve reseated the memory module but it may be worth a closer inspection and contact clean.

It may also be that an electrolytic capacitor is on the way out. Temperature would affect this. They're generally used to smooth the PSU supply lines. These caps are all over the place on the MoBo so it would be worth looking for any that show signs of leakage or bulges.

From what you’ve said the crash is pretty abrupt because the disk is left in a mess.

Often a careful visual inspection of the boards on both sides will give you enough of a clue to sus the problem.

tunaman wrote:
I tried restarting a few times but got an error each time indicating that it couldn’t start up.
About two weeks later I was practicing again on that Kronos and it shut down abruptly once more.

By your description my problem sounds more like your "two weeks later" experience. No error message, screen just goes black without warning.

The first time this happened 7 months ago it turned out to be the power supply unit. This time, exact same symptoms. Either my PSU was bad (tech said it was new) or something is triggering it. I've read alotta posts by people here that have the latter problem as well as the former.

tunaman - Thanks for posting your story. Frustrating to say the least. Please let me know what happens.

Hector - Yes I am using a UPS. Power failure happened when plugged into UPS & also when plugged into a wall directly.

tunaman - one more question ..

by "backs" I assume you mean backing tracks ... so with your K73s, are you able to transfer programs, combis, & song files from one to the other by loading them from USBs ?

Deleted... me thinks the post was directed elsewhere... needed more coffee!

rickster1 wrote:tunaman - one more question ..

by "backs" I assume you mean backing tracks ... so with your K73s, are you able to transfer programs, combis, & song files from one to the other by loading them from USBs ?

Stupid spell check! Corrected post above... Yes, was supposed to read “back-ups”.

Yes, I have identical content on both keyboards. I copy the custom samples, song files, and PCG files from my primary to the secondary and load them so that they are in sync.

One item of note - many of the Global values aren’t stored in the PCG file and must be configured manually. This includes the KSC auto-load entries.

As an added bonus the last time I had the bottom off, I took the time to install a RJ45 pass-through connector in the back of the case and hooked up the ethernet interface, so that one is now accessible on my home LAN and I can use FTP to transfer the files.

I’ll be doing this mod on my other K2 at some point in the near future, as it is extremely convenient.

I have been thinking of upgrading my Kronos 2011 by cloning the existing ssd to a larger one using Acronis TrueImage software rather than a hardware cloner. Seems others have done this successfully. http://www.korgforums.com/forum/phpbb2/ ... 433#718433 Good tip on a quiet fan too. It was one of the first things I noticed when thinking nit playing

Tunaman, I'm going to attempt this with your instructions on my Kronos 2 88. I'm curious as to why during the partition resizing process you didn't just resize /dev/sdb6 korg/rw to the full space? Would that have worked?