As documented at the bottom of this thread, I've been attempting to get my empeg upgraded from 2x20GB drives to 1x80GB. After I realized I wasn't going to get anywhere trying to load everything onto the drive using my backup Mk2, I bit the bullet and put the drive into my main Mk2a. I ran the disk builder successfully then applied 2.0b13 to sync my 40GB or so of tunes. Over the last day or so I finally got all the music loaded, then decided to load v3 alpha. Upon applying the v3 upgrade, I now have an empty Playlists menu. I went to the shell and all my fids seem to be there in /drive0/fids. Thinking something was screwy with the database, I went and deleted the files from /empeg/var (database, database3, playlists, and tags) but after it rebuilds the database, my playlists are *still* missing. Connecting with emplode shows no playlists. Did I do something majorly wrong? I know I'm supposed to be a pro at this stuff, but this is the first time I've started with a completely fresh drive, and I'm not sure if upgrading to v3 was a great idea so early on in this process.

This is extremely frustrating, on a day when everything else has been frustrating too.

BTW I flashed back to 2.0b13 and still no playlists after rebuilding the database. I'm fscked, aren't I?

Are the symlinks in /empeg still there?

I think so...

empeg:/empeg# ls -l

total 2

drwxr-xr-x    2 0        0            1024 Jul 24  2002 bin

lrwxrwxrwx    1 0        220            14 Jul 24  2002 fids0 -> ../drive0/fids

lrwxrwxrwx    1 0        220            14 Jul 24  2002 fids1 -> ../drive1/fids

drwxr-xr-x    6 0        0            1024 Jul 24  2002 lib

lrwxrwxrwx    1 0        220            13 Jul 24  2002 var -> ../drive0/var

.

Weird. How big is the database in /empeg/var? Are there any messages on the serial port when rebuilding the database?

It's very strange that it doesn't work with 2.0!

Well I'm switching to unorthodox methods now... Mark's fidsift.sh is currently running, and I'm going to flash to v3 alpha to see if that helps. I agree, it's really weird. I think the size of the database file was real small, the size of the database3 file after upgrading to v3 alpha was around 7k, so that's obviously an empty database.

Okay, now this is ridiculous. After running fidsift.sh and quitting back to the player, the database rebuilds, and I have ONE of my top level playlists (Albums) but not the other (Singles.) WTF???

Were you using Hijack earlier or a stock kernel?

Hopefully v3a works otherwise it's going to be a loooong process to copy everything over again.

Tried both stock and Hijack v344. Actually 2.0b13 supports the new fids structure (I think) so I don't think I need to copy everything over again unless I can't get this database issue worked out. I didn't have any errors during either of the syncs.

Oh, another weird thing, each time I've loaded v3, when I quit to the shell, I get a memory violation of some type and it can't run the shell. The only way I can run the shell is by breaking out of the player completely (or install telnetd and telnet in, but with all the upgrading I've been doing, that stuff keeps getting wiped.)

And doing a rough headcount from my fids directory, I have 31 _XXXXX subdirs after fidsift, and with 256 in each, thats about 7000+ tunes, which is what I synced (about 5000 in the albums playlist and 2000 in the singles playlist.) So the tunes are all there...

And it was working before your applied the v3a player? Really strange...

I know it's not much use now but you can actually copy the fids directly from the old drives to the new one. It's much faster than doing it over ethernet as you'd be using DMA. You just need to get two laptop -> desktop IDE adapters or a Linux partition to temporarily store everything. I did my upgrade from 20GB to 60GB in a couple of hours that way..

quit to a shell with ^C instead of q (or vice versa; i forget)

Yeah, but I kinda wanted to get a fresh start with things anyway, the files on my desktop had much cleaner tags that hadn't yet been transferred over to the empeg. Neat strategy, though.

I don't *know* that both root playlists were there before I upgraded, the sync succeeded and I went directly to flashing v3.

Hmm, after my latest rebuild post fidsift where my albums playlist suddenly appeared, I just fired up emplode, and emplode (but not the player) seems to now be able to see the Singles playlist. Looks like it's even intact... I guess I should sync now and see if everything's happy....

SUCCESS!!!

Okay, both root playlists are back, and my DownDownDown shuffle shows all 7277 of my songs. Whew.

I guess since I'm a gambling man I'll try the v3 upgrade now.

Splendid, I'm back in business, v3 alpha's loaded and all. I guess it was just one of those freak things that happens when you try to sync 40 GB in one night. Well, thanks for helping out.