Hi all,

It's been a while since I've been on the boards. I just don't seem to have time these days.

As usual, I come back when I need help. After 5 1/2 yrs faithful service my 20GB drive has recently started to play up on my Mk2 so I thought it was about time I treated myself to a new drive ... or 2. I've ended up getting 2 80GB Hitachi Travelstars.

I've run the builder and the player upgrade for developer 2.01 and got the usual failures so now I'm trying the manual format detailed on different planet.

My question is this: The instructions assume the drive being formatted is the secondary one. I'm planning on doing each drive separately. I copied and pasted the mke2fs command but it complained no such file or directory on hdc so I thought, if this is the primary then I'll swap hdc for hda and try that, which worked. I did the same for the mkswap and the dd commands but now I come onto the mount against drive1. Again, I'm thinking I change that for drive0 but then I thought - I'm going to do the same on the next drive so am I doing the right thing or have I completely missed something somewhere?

Hoping this hasn't been detailed previously and I just haven't been unable to find it.

I'm pretty sure you're on the right track. I haven't gone through Roger's steps for a single drive player, but yes, if you have the drive plugged in as the primary drive, then the commands should be for drive0 instead of drive1.

Thank you, Tony, as ever, for the quick response. I still marvel at how you do that.

Anyway, all done now. Probably more by luck than anything else.

The sequence in a nutshell:

I put the first drive in, loaded the builder, loaded 2.01 final developer and then formatted drive1 as detailed on the different planet web site.

This got me 74.4GB showing in emplode.

Then I removed the drive and did the same with the 2nd new drive, formatting drive0.

Then I connected my old 20GB, and loaded up emplode. This showed 91.5GB.

Copying across all my old tunes took a few hours but the copying of the config seemed to fail - probably due to the drive errors I'd already been getting. Not a problem as I'd already copied the config.ini using emplode.

I removed the old drive and checked the player. This showed 58.2GB free out of 74.4GB.

Finally, I added my new 2nd drive and now I have 133GB showing out of 149GB. That should do me for a while.

Now all I need is to get emphatic and a new boot logo on there and start loading up some tunes. That's a job for tomorrow.

Thanks to the wonderful guides that are available from riocar and different planet.

After reading the drive upgrade guide I have question that I haven't seen discussed on the board.

Can I simply drop a working empeg (single) drive into a different unit as the second drive?
Or do I have to re-format as drive1?

It would be nice if all I needed was the slave-jumper, some screws, and to clip the drive onto the ribbon cable. I've been putting off the project because I haven't felt confident about the drive formatting exercises. That, and the project has been low on the list.

Thanks!

You may need to wipe anything that was in the reused drive's music partition, but it would certainly work.

So any previously loaded music on the 'new' slave would not be seen by the player at all?

Hmm- I could pop the "2nd" drive into the unit as a single/primary, then use emplode to delete everything, then reinstall the original drive as primary (and the jumper on the 2nd)...

I guess I should get over my fears of HyperTerm and Bash prompts. This kind of a project is good for familiarizing myself with it all.
When you say 'wipe', how are you thinking I should do that?

Ooops. I mistook your intent - that you wanted just the drive space.

If you already have music on the reused drive, leave it alone. The only trouble will be to resyncronize the FIDS. I am not sure of the best way to do this off hand...

Edit: Basically, the problem would be that if the reused drive was primary, there would be a root playlist on both players, and FID numbers that would appear on both physical drives. You would have to renumber the FIDs on the reused drive and link them into your playlists somehow. Not sure of the best way to do that.

Actually, I don't care for the music that is on the drive-to-be-added. I will wipe it out in any event.
The question is when.
I imagined I could drop in the drive as a slave, emplode would see the junk on there, and I could start deleting.
FID syncing? What's involved in that?

Certainly I could imagine a scenario where the drive contents were to be saved, but I've already got it all backed up on my NAS and don't want it in the empeg after the drive is added.

Edit:
Ah- I think I'll go with this route:
1 install used 'full' drive as primary (single)
2 delete via emplode all music and playlists
3 reinstall original drive + used 'empty' drive as slave

Thanks, Paul!

If you do not want the music on the reused drive, an easier approach (if you are familiar with shell) would be:

Install reused drive as slave.
Boot the empeg - it will take longer because of a database mismatch, finding duplicate files.
Drop to command line.
Set the drives read / write.
cd /drive1/fids
delete all files
Set drives read only.
Exit and reboot.

Paul-
I'll have to read more about FIDs, but I recently got it into my head that the FIDs literally are the mp3 files (plus some empeg cataloging data), yes?
So deleting them while the prompt was pointed only at that particular drive I can understand.
(My brain wandered off into a different world where the catalog was built from all mp3 files on the drives. The catalog would be rebuilt of all mp3s afterward, thus avoiding conflicting data and saving the files on the drive. This doesn't make deleting them in a massive dump easy, though, because emplode doesn't allow specific drive access. I would then have to crawl through a long list of all the files and carefully select the ones to delete. I don't think that's the way it actually works, though, so as I said, my mind was wandering.)

Roger-
Thanks very much for the great explanation!
I believe I will do the work using the methods I'm most familiar with.

Thanks to you both!

Thanks, Tony!

I thought that I would add in that I have been using the player with my new drives for a week now. One FID seems to have had difficulty copying across and I initially had some errors but that seems to have gone away after a few resynchs. I've yet to check to see what that track was (I exported to CSV a while back) and whether I still have it.

The only difference I've noticed otherwise is that I think it is a little slower in displaying next track info using emphatic. But, that may be my imagination now that I am more actively looking to see if there are any issues. Otherwise, same as ever. Greatest product money could buy.