The LifeDrive Mobile Manager from Palm is a rather nice device. It has Wifi, Bluetooth, a 4 gig hard drive and a nice 320×480 screen. But the one big downside is the 4 gig hard drive. It’s nice that it’s so big, but it’s slow and uses more power than flash memory, which Palm could have easily used. And as all hard drives are, it’s more fragile and prone to crashing. The hard drive in my LifeDrive bit the dust recently so my LifeDrive was completely broken. I took it apart and found that the hard drive was in compact flash format. A Hitachi “Microdrive”. After searching around the interweb, I found this article which details how to replace the microdrive with a 4 gig compact flash card. I ordered one of the cards they said would work with the LifeDrive from New Egg. Once I got the card, it took me all of 30 minutes following this tutorial to recreate the PalmOS and get it installed on the cf card. Now the LifeDrive boots in half the time and is much more responsive. If I had know that doing this hack would be so easy, I would have done it sooner.