Greetings!

The install went very smoothly. As far as I know so far, I only made one minor mistake, which I will go into detail later...

I did not try to use the disk builder image one two drives at the same time, but I did find that it would not work on two brand new drives in a row. Basically, the first went fine. I powered down, changed drives and restarted the player. It was unable to decompress the kernel onto the new (blank) drive, so I had to upload the builder software again. That software primed and pumped all of the partitions, so it must be run on any new drive. It would have blown away a used drive, but not a new one.

I began loading material from my old drives, but I found it was taking too long for my taste, and I was going to clean up and reload most of it anyway. I wanted to start fresh, so I stopped the disk to disk copy, and started with a clean empeg and emplode.

My mistake was in the hot glue. I needed to repair my unit when it arrived with a loose cable (the connection to the mainboard, not the drives), and I saw that it had no hot glue on the top of the drive or on the mainboard. I assumed I had no hot glue at all. Wrong! The underside of the drives was glued. I did not realize this until it was too late. I damaged the ribbon wire connector for the slave drive - popped off the back plate, so the ribbon was exposed on the back. I was able to fix it (more hot glue), and the drives test fine. I would, however, like to replace it in the long term. If anyone out there has a part number I should be looking for, please let me know. I know there is a part number for the Mark I in the FAQ.

[Additional: I have since checked out Videk and ordered part number 3018 - a dual drive model of the 3017 from the FAQ. I will soon find out if they ship to the US. Their site seems to allow international orders, but...]

Meanwhile, I am dumping my collection onto the empeg right now. Thanks to everyone for the help, to Tony for the FAQ and to everyone at empeg for the support and for a great product!!!

Paul G.
SN# 090000587 (96GB Smoke)

Edited by pgrzelak on 26/07/01 04:57 PM.