normski2

Nice one Steve. Well ... Rome wasn't built in a day Well done and many thanks.

Open the bonnet and look at the back of the headlight area. If you see a hatch cover with " DANGER High Voltage...danger of death etc etc" then that will indicate there is HID units within. If nothing but plain black abs hatch then it will be Halogen. Also, it is widely reported that HID units must have a jet wash facility fitted. So, from the outside, look for the little lift up cover on the bumper immediately under the headlight. If you are looking at night ... turn on the headlight dipped beam and you should see the beam pattern move up then down to level. They are self levelling units.

If I'm understanding you right Jack ...think you have misunderstood me. The USB port is in my armrest. I use this to connect my iphone or ipod. The USB behind the plastic facia is only used to update the sat nav data ... via a USB stick. There is no DVD sat nav disc in my car. My car is MY2010 and has HDD. I doubt ( although I'd be happy to be proved wrong) that you can retrofit a USB port into an earlier car. I guess the only option is to try for yourself and see if you can get it to function. If you do then I suspect there will be a few requests to enlighten others as to how you did it ... so make notes and take pics as you go. Best of luck.

No pic visible ... but never mind. Behind the facia is either a DVD slot or a USB port. If you have the ML with HDD then you should see the option to 'record' the disc to your HDD when you access a loaded CD. Plus you'll see a Gracenote logo.

Ah FUBAR at work then!! Unless you're on a mobile

Can anyone get access to the 'How to' guides in the tutorials section at the front of the forum? Here ... http://www.lexusownersclub.co.uk/forum/tutorials/ I've tried several times recently .... but all I get is Something went wrong. Please try again. Do the Mods know of any issues?

I've read that some folks have disconnected the battery for an hour or so to do this. You'll lose radio station settings and need to resync your windows afterwards. I have used a tin of BG44K. Put one through when i got the car and plan to another after 20,000 miles. I think its good stuff ... but that's just my opinion. You pour the whole tin into a nearly empty fuel tank and put 50 litres of fuel on top and drive around as normal. There are some guides at the front of the Forum in the 'How To' section, here http://www.lexusownersclub.co.uk/forum/index.php?app=tutorials But it doesn't seem to be accessible at present. Maybe a problem after the site upgrade.

This is what mine looks like. There is a small (2mm ) hole at each end of the smoked plastic facia .. where the hazard switch is located. You can see the one on the left directly under the the word Auto, directly in the centre of the facia. Once you've seen that you can work out where the one on the right is. Behind the facia is either a DVD slot or a USB port. If you have the ML with HDD then you should see the option to 'record' the disc to your HDD. You can get 200 or so CD's on the HDD.

Just to add a bit more to the pot of uncertainty!! Mine is a 59 plate (Feb 2010) - SEL MM/ML - I have Mark Levinson music system - I have HDD Sat Nav - USB in the armrest cubby Also have 18" 5 spoke wheels - Rear Sun Blind - Indicators in the Door Mirrors - L shaped Reversing Lights It was thus from purchase

Nice one. Hope all goes well. Do share plenty of pics of exterior and interior.

Sounds like are pretty much identical systems

She is right in that sense. Slightly misunderstood what you meant. On the ipod you would select Music then from the options you scroll the thumb wheel down to songs. There you'll see all songs and the letters of the alphabet appear as you scroll through. You are right about copying and deleting the original.

You would normally load 'Playlists' or 'Albums' onto the ipod. You can then choose tracks from within each if you wished. You could I guess make up a large list of tracks on a playlist and then play those tracks however you wish. Your easiest way would be to set the car system to 'random' play, or maybe hit the up or down tracks to navigate. I can see the individual tracks of a playlist on the menu screen and just press that track required and it plays. I assume the Mk3 will do the same or better. Choosing by track ... mmmm .... that is going to be quite laborious if you are jumping around between albums and playlists, and very time consuming, and could only be safely undertaken by a passenger. Far better to pre-select your tracks and put them in a playlist. I do this in Itunes .... select New Playlist, then drag and drop tracks from different albums into that playlist. In this way I have my own 'Best Of ####' selections for much of my music. Don't know what phones you use. The missus and I both have Iphones (offspring cast offs) and they will typically have 16, 32 or 64 Mb capacities. That's actually quite a lot of music. These days I mostly use my iphone connected for Phone and Music. But I'll take the Ipod on holidays.

Here And here Gobsmackingly awesome undertaking

Out of curiosity ... I just loaded a flac file onto a USB stick ... nope, nothing seen. Mind you the IS300h might see it, maybe ... or am I being too darned optimistic?

Jack, if you fancy a bit of detective work ... take a look here at back catalogues. You can look at Nov 08, March 09 and Feb 10 variants. http://www.lexus.co.uk/owners/your-lexus/#PastLexusBrochures Hope that helps a bit!!

Think you have to go to dealer or get hold of Techstream thingy to do that. Well, that's mighty odd.

Quite right Steve. Check 'em out fully so you are happy with what you are doing, Geoff. Can you play flac files through the car system? I've not tried, so not sure. Personally I wouldn't bother ... save the flac files for the home Hi Fi. I do have many flac 'mother' folders of the more important stuff in my collection. These will be quite large files though. Single tracks can be as much as a full Mp3 album. For example:- Steely Dan album 'AJA'. Whole album in Mp3 @320kbps is around 96Mb. In flac, it's 890Mb. Sorry Geoff, not trying to bamboozle you. For your knowledge ... flac is Free Lossless Audio Codec ... its similar...ish to Mp3 but the music is compressed without any loss of quality. So it is vastly superior to Mp3. Geoff, if you have a Bluray player it is very likely you can play Flac and Mp3 files through it, if you wanted to audition the difference for yourself.Pretty confident all Bluray players have a USB port.

Indicators in the door mirrors? L shaped reversing lights?

Think you have SE i Rear window blind?

Yep, mine is SEL ...definitely, I've seen it on Lexus records. Its a 2010 SEL MM/ML

Hi Geoff Its a 1Tb external drive ... with about 380Gb of music files and other important back up stuff/photos etc. I keep the music separate as PC's can go pop. Had an internal HDD go pop last year ... pretty damned irritating. I'd be gutted if i lost all that music. You won't really need huge capacity USB sticks for music. That's why I only have the 4Gb (also have a 16 but rarely use it) size. It also means its quicker to delete and reload. I can get more than enough on 4Gb for my listening. I usually put 20 or 30 albums on a stick. If I want loads I just plug in my Ipod (like I do when we go to France).. Your IS300 may happily read larger capacity sticks ...kind of a suck it and see moment in all honesty. You probably have larger capacity on dash-cams because, I guess, the files are that much larger.

I use Itunes ... in fairness only because I've used it for years ... so am really comfortable with what I can do. I also have Iphones and Ipods (me and the wifey). All my music is stored in a separate drive accessed via my PC (Windows 10 Desktop). I don't use Apple Itunes designated 'aac' files. I do everything in 'Mp3' at 320Kbps. You can mess around with stuff in the Preferences section. It's quite straightforward. A typical album can be 90 Mb or so. I have three 4Gb USB sticks that I load up and change from time to time. When I use the USB source i always make sure each folder only has the Mp3 music files ... I don't copy the artwork or info folders ... as I found it seemed to cause reading issues. This may not be the case with the IS300 as I think you may be able to display artwork on your screen. Also have Ipod Classic loaded up with 130Gb of playlists and some on my Iphone. There is also 'Foobar'. That's another free to download system. With all these methods there will be updates from time to time. I always choose to wait until I see Itunes Forum comments saying the upgrade is OK before I allow the upgrade. There was a Apple Itunes upgrade around Oct 2015 that caused a huge amount of problems to Itunes users. It was not fixed until Mid January. So beware the instant upgrade!!!

Reckon iftikhar has cleared that one up .... its the SE- i I'd thought from his previous post that he was getting the SEL That makes a lot of sense then, as the centre console is normally woodgrained on the SEL. Mine is like this...you can just see the wood effect at the bottom of the picture. I guess there are quite a few variables based what is added on as 'extras' by the first purchaser. I'm still surprised there is no USB in the armrest. I had figured that was common to all facelift vehicles (in the same vein as the flashers in the door mirrors). Mine is the same plate (59) albeit Feb 2010 registered.

I wonder if a previous owner upgraded the rear light cluster? Its a possibility