I am getting very nervous about my 120 GB HD as the number of tracks keeps growing and I would like to be able to backup the contents to an external HD. Is it possible to mount an external HD via USB and copy the tracks via the shell to the backup drive ? I know, I know, it would take ages... I just want to know wether this is technically possible ?

What are your 'backup experiences' if any ? How do you backup the contents of your Central ?

Much appreciated, Miguel

There is no way to mount an external drive via USB, but you could temporarily connect a second hard drive in place of the CD-ROM drive and use the shell to mount it and copy the partitions.

This will require a USB keyboard and some linux knowledge.

Hi Miguel,
I've also had the same backup concerns as you and have used a hard drive duplicator made by Corporate Systems to backup my drive. The link for their product is below...As outlined in a previous post, I'm very glad I did this because I had my main Central hard drive fail on me last summer. Luckily, I was able to break out my backup drive, and add about 15-20 CDs to get it back up to snuff...

http://www.driveduplicators.com/

The latest version of Partition Magic (8.0, I believe) recognizes a valid Central disc and showed what looked to be valid partition information (earlier versions said the Central drive was "Bad" even when I knew it worked in the Central). So maybe Partition Magic could help you copy the partitions to a backup drive on your PC...

In any event, I think it's a smart thing to make a backup hard drive because of all the ripping time spent and also the time spent fixing titles, etc.....I've never tried to connect a second drive to the machine for the purpose of copying, so I guess that might be another way to do it like Tony says if you have the command knowledge, etc.

If someone does that, I'd appreciate a tutorial or some sort of writeup that we could all use on our own boxes (and I'd also like to learn more about the various Linux commands that it would take to make a backup drive...)

Thanks, Randy

Thanks guys ! very clear. One more question: what about the CD unit ? can this be easily replaced by an OEM one (or some concrete brand) in case the one in the Rio dies ?

I have taken a walk in the world of hard drive and media duplication hardware and I came across this one:

http://www.logicube.com/products/hd_duplication/solitaire.asp

If this works with the Central it would be very convenient, since you don't have to extract the HD to clone it, USB can do... and they claim it's super fast !

Miguel

Hi Miguel,
I'm not sure if that unit would work as it seems to be built for PCs...See the text below regarding the USB connection...

USB 1.1/2.0 (optional)
For easy cloning, and for connection to a Windows network server. Optional USB feature allows for data transfer speeds exceeding 700 MB/min (USB 2.0)

I don't think the Central would know how to service the USB connection to this device....Of course, I could be wrong. But on the other hand, that's a pretty pricy piece of gear to back up the drive if it did work. Do you have access to one or are you considering a purchase?

Thanks, Randy

Hi Randy,

There is this part, under features, that says:

"Clones any operating system
The system supports FAT16, 32 & NTFS file-systems. Exact MD5 verification for all partition types (includes proprietary O/S, e.g. Mac, Linux, Unix, Sun, OS6 support). "

... so I thought it could work with the Central, but I'm not sure either. The part you mention on the Windows network server, I interpret it as being able to hook up the Solitaire Turbo to a server, so that you can clone other machines' HD from the network. As I say, I'm not sure either.

I'm not planning to buy the thing for the moment, my Rio's HD is by far not full, so I'll give it some more time, do some more research on the stuff, and perhaps meanwhile the price of this thing drops ;-)

One more question: what about the CD unit ? can this be easily replaced by an OEM one

Not really, no. The ripping software is optimised for the particular drive in the Central. It might not work with another one.

Otherwise, it's a standard IDE CD-ROM drive.

1. Can you attach a HDD via USB?

I had mixed success with this. I installed a linux distro on the hdd, loaded the usb-storage module (and supporting modules), however the linux-arm kernel didn't like my particular usb-hdd hardware (I got some wierd USB errors). So I just hooked up ssh and used scp to copy the HDD down.

2. Can you replace the CD burner?

This is an interesting question. We know that the cd burning software has been "optimized" to support the specific cdrom drive. However, we also have the source to the cd burning software. It should be pretty easy to take a look at the differences between the stock cdrtools and the rio cdrtools. If the interface hasn't changed it should be fairly simple to drop in a new copy of cdrtools which would work with the new (and hopefully faster) cdrom drive.

The question would then be: is there anything in the player software that would cause the new cd burning program to die?

My 2c.

"So I just hooked up ssh and used scp to copy the HDD down. "

So you mean copy the Rio's HDD to your computer's HDD with ssh / scp via ethernet ? Does this take long ?

Miguel

source to the cd burning software

The CD ripping code is optimised for that particular model of CD drive. The writing code is, AFAIK, stock cdrecord.

Does anyone know what CD unit model is contained in the Central ? I know its a TEAC, but I can't remember the exact model... and I'm to o lazy to open the case to check it ;-))

thanks,
Miguel

W58E, if I remember correctly.

I suppose long is a relative term. It took under 24 hours, which I was more than happy to wait for. I think you can use some command line options for scp to tell it to use less strong encryption, but I'm not sure that the transfer was CPU bound. I was transmitting over 10bt and wifi, so I suspect that wifi was the bottleneck.

I always thought that ARM processors were very slow, but it's very capable of running linux apps at a good rate of speed.
______
"So I just hooked up ssh and used scp to copy the HDD down. "
So you mean copy the Rio's HDD to your computer's HDD with ssh / scp via ethernet ? Does this take long ?

The issue is more the ripping code. cdrecord will probably work fine on any drive, but the ripping code is carefully crafted around the bugs present in that particular drive.

YMMV, lots.

Hugo

Hmm. Are that many bugs present in all cdrom drives? Was this a "bargain-basement" drive that made it worthwhile to code around the bugs? Just curious. Thx.

Are that many bugs present in all cdrom drives?

Hell, yes. They're all broken to one degree or another. The one we used in the Central was chosen because:

1. We could actually source a whole load of them in large enough quantities.
2. It had fewer bugs than most of the other drives we looked at.
3. The bugs it did have were easier to work around.

We chose a specific drive -- rather than attempt to support a whole bunch of different ones -- because we didn't have time to write code for and test on more than the one drive.

Hi,

Thanks to Randy / Tony for their outline and tips on installing a new drive in the Central. I am still very interested in being able to backup the contents of my 120 GB HHD to another drive, preferably to my Win XP machine. I know this a very tricky thing but I'm sure some guru among you could be able to put together some instructions like Randy's did in his post (like what Linux commands have to be used / installed in the Central etc).

I don't know wether I am asking for an impossible in this forum due to legal constraints, but I can solemny swear that my intention here is merely to keep my increasing volume of music safe.

Thanks,

Miguel

Well, that depends. A quick way might be to download everything through jemplode. I downloaded a few songs with jemplode, but I'm not sure how well it would work for 120G and if you can upload the songs.

If that doesn't work, then more effort is required. I did it through installing an entire debian ARM distribution on the disk. If you get past that you can easily SCP stuff off, or hook up a usb drive and copy the stuff directly off. Just make sure you get a usb drive supported by the ARM kernel. The one I have wasn't supported (or rather it was, but didn't work) so I used the SCP to copy off the music.

I posted my instructions under a recent thread "full debian dist..."

Keep us posted on your progress and we could give you some more pointers.

It's simpler than that. You just disconnect the CD-Rom drive, plug the old drive into the CD-Rom drive's cable, drop to a shell prompt with ctrl-alt-del on a USB keyboard plugged into the Central, and issue the commands to mount the second drive and copy its FIDs directory.

The only problem is that I don't know the commands.

That would work, assuming that the boot process doesn't choke when it doesn't detect a cdrom on boot.

However, that wouldn't make for easy backups if you want to keep an updated copy.

If anyone wants to give this method a shot, you should know the following commands:

mkdir /mnt/hdb
mount -t ext2 /dev/hdb /mnt/hdb
cp -r /drive0 /mnt/hdb

In reply to:

---

That would work, assuming that the boot process doesn't choke when it doesn't detect a cdrom on boot.

---

Could anybody please confirm / deny this ? I like this solution.

thanks,

miguel

That seems to copy the whole hard drive. What about making it a bit faster by just copying the FIDs folder?

I'll have to refresh me memory on this one. I did try to hook up two Hard Drives to the Central, with the idea in mind that maybe I'd be able to store music on them and get more space. It's been awhile since I've tried it, but I believe that the result was that the machine wouldn't boot. I've tried so many things, though, that I'd have to do it again to verify it...

I just use a CorpSystems Hard Drive duplicator to make my backup copies...It's not the fastest system in the world (both drives are on the same IDE channel), but it does make an exact duplicate....That reminds me, it's about time to back up my stuff again...I did have my main 120 GB Central drive fail, and the backup I had set aside saved my bacon....I would recommend a backup disk to everyone who has invested hours ripping and fixing titles...

Randy

Yes, I also thought of using one of these HD duplicators. Problem is that those thing are quite expensive, especially in Europe. If hooking up a HD works then I'd defintely would go for this solution. Besides, I'm interested in copying only the FIDs, not the entire kernel.

thanks,
Miguel

Besides, I'm interested in copying only the FIDs, not the entire kernel.

Assuming you've got enough music that you're concerned about backing it up, the additional time/space required for backing up the "kernel" is negligible.

The kernel, plus the player binary, databases and stuff is likely to be no more than about 30Mb, which is only the size of 7-10 MP3 files.

Correct me if I'm wrong (I haven't poked around on my central in a while) but all the stuff on "drive0" is either music or local configuration. The kernel, etc, is contained in /.

I don't remember the exact partition layout off the top of my head, but it seemed to be designed so that during an upgrade, you could replace all of the kernel, but leave the music and configuration untouched.

Doing a backup of the root partition could be more complex given boot sectors, etc. It probably wouldn't be worth the effort given that you can just restore root off of the cd.

Oh right! Duh, I should have realized that.

So does anyone want to try those commands and see if they work? (i.e., there's nothing special you have to do to get the unit to boot?)

It probably wouldn't be worth the effort

Yeah, that's the effort involved in backing it up so that it can be restored directly from the backup. As you say, since you can reinstall from the rescue CD, there's no point.

My point, however, was that worrying about time/space as a reason for not backing up the whole shebang wasn't worth it.

Oh, and IIRC, there is no boot sector on the hard disk -- it loads one kernel out of flash, which mounts the root filesystem and then loads another one.

Digging up an old thread here....

Quote:
That would work, assuming that the boot process doesn't choke when it doesn't detect a cdrom on boot.

However, that wouldn't make for easy backups if you want to keep an updated copy.

If anyone wants to give this method a shot, you should know the following commands:

mkdir /mnt/hdb
mount -t ext2 /dev/hdb /mnt/hdb
cp -r /drive0 /mnt/hdb

Those commands... hdb would be whatever drive is plugged in place of the CD ROM drive? In other words, if I initialize a fresh drive using the "restore to as new" CD, then I plug the old drive back in its original spot and put the new blank drive in place of the CD-ROM, then those commands copy the songs from the old drive to the new drive?

Anyone actually done this?

(I'm going to be upgrading the drive on my Central with an extra 60 I've got lying around, and I'm looking for the best way to preserve the songs.)

Trying to put it back the way it was, I did rmdir /mnt/hdb, which worked, but now it won't go back into read only mode:

Code:

---

jupiter:/empeg/bin# ro
mount: can't find / in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab

---

Hm. Well, in the absence of a on-the-central solution, I think I'll just mount both drives on the Windows PC with fs-driver and copy the files there.

Hm. That software recognizes that there are two drives present that contain linux partitions, but it tells me they are not formatted, and when I select the drives in Explorer, it asks me if I want to format them.

Even though they both can boot a Central.

Is it that they're the wrong file system type for that driver to use? What file system does the Central use?

Yup, that's it. Central drives are ReiserFS.

/me looks for software that will let my windows PC read and write ReiserFS...

Hm. Appears as though such an animal does not exist.

Carp.

...little help?

Keep in mind that the only reason I'm thinking the Central drives are Reiser is because the mountdiag tool from here tells me they are. Are they?

Anyone?

<insert sound of crickets chirping here>

Hi Tony,
I've had luck using Ghost software to duplicate a smaller hard drive over to a larger hard drive. In fact, Ghost even uses up the additional disk space by making the largest partition "take up the slack", which is what you want.

I have a special older PC with Ghost installed and removable hard drive bays. I come along with a couple of drives to copy and just plug them in and "Ghost" one to the other....

I don't know of any way to accomplish what you're trying to do....I hope that helps....

If you can't figure out a work-around, I'd be happy to do the duplication on my setup and ship the drives back to you....

Randy

If only I owned Ghost.

Incidentally, I get the same error when trying to mount /dev/hdb as reiserfs. It's almost like the central doesn't even support the mount command.

A little help on instant messenger from Mike Schrag and we've determined the following, based on messing with the thing and finding comments from Roger and others here on the BBS:

- The large music partitions on the Central are indeed ReiserFS.

- /etc/fstab is not used by the central.

- The central doesn't even seem to use the mount command at all. When you type mount by itself, it's supposed to enumerate everything that's mounted. On the central, that's nothing at all, it's blank.

I have another avenue of research. If that pans out, I'll get back here and post the results.

I have given up and I'm doing an all-night synch with Jemplode and the Ethernet adapter.

Of course! How stupid of me to not realize that.