Dave,

There is no official way that I know of to dump or backup Solton X1 hard disk to computer yet since Solton has not issued any software for it. The Yamaha MIDI driver works with Yamaha equipment, unless Solton uses the same wiring for the To Host port as with Yamaha's. Unless someone write a program to backup Solton X1 through MIDI, backing up the X1 requires using floppies for copying data from its hard disk. MIDI is serial communication and MIDI backup is as slow as backing up to floppies.

However, if you have a laptop PC like Dell Inspiron 7500 which can be configured to have 2 hard disks (using either the DVD drive bay or the battery bay), you can take out the Solton X1 hard disk and fit it in the extra laptop PC hard disk enclosure and use software like "Ghost" to backup all the contents of Solton X1 hard disk into a disk image (a snapshot of the whole disk) and store the file in the other hard disk. Then from the disk image, you can build as many Solton X1 hard disk as you want. This facility is perhaps best for music store owners like George to help his customers load up arranger hard disks. The only problem is to go through the pain of taking out the 2.5" hard disk from the arranger keyboard for the initial dump of disk image, and also putting the cloned disks back into the arranger keyboards. This method of cloning is very fast, about 15 minutes to clone a hard disk (at about 60 KB/S or better depending on the speed of your disks) when compared to manual loading of styles and songs for almost a week. Lately laptop storage upgrade packages with a PCMCIA card and an external hard disk enclosure for seond hard disk for duplicating the disk image of original laptop hard disk into the seond one is very popular and is also a viable alternative for clone existing disks.

Paul Ip
from Texas